SOURCE: Reynolds, Oliver. “Speaking Subjectively.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4877 (20 September 1996): 23.

In the following review, Reynolds discusses Thubron's use of scientific concepts in Distance.

Edward Sanders, the narrator of Colin Thubron's sixth novel, Distance, is doing postgraduate research into black holes. At the start of the novel, he has lost his short-term memory: “The first thing I notice is the hand resting on the tablecloth. It is lean, almost delicate. I move it a little, to be sure it is mine.” By the end, he has remembered the shocking events which provoked his amnesia, and the book's structure, alternating present and past, follows the gradual recovery of his memory. One of the strengths of the novel is its depiction of the self as a function of time: how can you exist in the present without the ballast of the past? Sanders's repressed memories are bound up with a love-affair...