The odds of the planet next door hosting intelligent life are—that’s not luck. That’s a miracle. It means something.

In December 1960, Crystal Singer, her boyfriend Rick, and three other MIT grad students take a cross-country road trip from Boston to Arizona to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for thirty years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she’s solved it, and Rick is intent on putting her answer to the test—if he can keep her from cracking under the pressure on the way. But Crystal’s disappearance after the experiment will set him on a different path than he expected, forever changing the distance between them.

Filled with mystery and wonder, Ethan Chatagnier’s Singer Distance is a novel about ambition, loneliness, exploration, and love—about how far we’re willing to go to communicate with a distant civilization, and the great lengths we’ll travel to connect with each other here on Earth.

Don't just take our word for it...

“Ethan Chatagnier’s Singer Distance is one of the rarest and best kinds of novels: a truly thrilling story driven by big ideas and bold writing, whose gripping mysteries only deepen as the plot thickens. You won’t see the stars and the planets above the same way once you’ve experienced this unforgettable book. You won’t look at our Earth the same way either.”
– Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“Soaring. . . . Excellent. . . . The elements of astronomy, numerology, love, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life are structured perfectly. . . . Readers are in for a memorable adventure.”
– Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An achingly beautiful look at living in the shadow of genius, science, math, and loving the difficult to love. Chatagnier looks at the sky and people with equal wonder, and the result is deeply moving. Singer Distance is a book for readers of Sagan, lovers of paradoxes, anyone who has ever looked up. This truly gorgeous novel will live with me for a long time.”
– Erika Swyler, author of Light from Other Stars

Taste the very first page

As soon as I saw the light off the side of the highway, I felt myself falling in love with it. It was too far from the road to be a town and too high up to be a farmhouse. The light was the wrong hue anyway. We’d passed many roadside lights in this week of night driving, and without realizing it I had become fluent in the language of them. This one was a word I couldn’t translate. No town huddled next to it. No road branched off toward it. Its unknowability, its unreachability, compelled me. I felt the urge to veer toward it.

Crystal slapped my shoulder and told me to wake up.

I gripped the wheel tighter and told her I wasn’t sleeping.

“You were drifting,” she said without judgment.

“Not much to hit out here.”

“Lucky for you.”

“The only thing you could hit out here is a pothole, and those are in the road.”

“You’re assuming the space is empty because you can’t see what’s in it. You should know your way around that old fallacy.” …

November 2022