The Measures Between Us

By Ethan Hauser

A storm is threatening the East Coast of America, swelling the rivers and submerging the roads, and as the clouds gather on the horizon the inhabitants of a small Boston suburb feel their lives begin to spiral away from them.

Vincent, a school teacher, meets with a former student, Henry, to discuss the wrenching possibility of hospitalising his only daughter. As he offers advice, Henry, now a young psychology professor, tests the boundaries of his own marriage, while Lucinda, his pregnant wife, harbours another secret. Shadowing these characters is Jack, a college intern, who gathers climate data and thinks of ways to bridge the distance between himself and his increasingly absent girlfriend.

As he logs field notes gathered from the surrounding forests and rivers, Jack becomes more and more preoccupied by the data: what it explains, along with the many things it does not about the places and people he treasures.

Connecting them all, as their paths are reshaped by the changing world around them, is Cynthia, a young woman uncertain of everything but her sadness.

The Measures Between Us delicately and powerfully traces the intricate strands that bind us together. At once sweeping and intimate, it is a revelatory novel of family and friendship, absence and belonging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781408837108

Ethan Hauser

Ethan Hauser received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His fiction has been published in Esquire, Playboy and New Stories From the South: The Year's Best, and he was a finalist for the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award. He lives in New York and is an editor at the New York Times, where his journalism also appears.