Paula Saunders' “stunning” new novel,
Starting From Here

“Starting From Here is a stirring, stunning novel about the desire for a certain kind of life and the quest to find it. Paula Saunders has written an ode to coming-of-age, independence, and transformation that is also an evocative time capsule brimming with memory and feeling. What a wonderful book this is.”

– Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings

Available for pre-order now

A Midwestern girl balances her dreams of becoming a dancer with the complications of growing up on her own, far from her working-class family, in this unforgettable, deeply affecting portrait of a young woman striving for greatness from the author of The Distance Home.

She could look in the mirror and see it all happening, everything she’d dreamed of, the potential everyone had seen in her blossoming right in front of her eyes, as if her spirit and flesh were merging, being born as one into light.

More than anything, René wants to be a dancer. Eve, her mother, supports René despite the overwhelming financial burden and increasing tension her training places on the family. But one thing is clear: René’s dreams are never going to come true in Rapid City, South Dakota, circa 1973.

Setting in motion a journey that will transform her from the inside out, René is sent to train alongside stick-thin, sculpted girls in Phoenix, then on to Denver and beyond, encountering along the way a dazzling sequence of eccentric and sometimes dangerous characters: creepy dads, mean girls, predatory radio announcers, kindly ex-opera singers, sham teachers, and avaricious cult leaders. Through it all, René pushes herself, doing everything she can to excel at her art while at the same time finding her way through the trials of adolescence.

But leaving home is not the same as escaping it. And try as she might, René can’t quite shake the aching she has for someone to love and accept her just the way she is, dancer or not, successful or not, perfect or imperfect.

Lyrical and incisive, Starting from Here is a story of facing the many challenges and terrors of girlhood, of reaching for something that exceeds your grasp, of the enduring contradictions of familial love, of right steps and wrong turns, and of somehow finding your way from wherever you are to wherever you need to go.

advance praise for Starting From Here

“I read Paula Saunders’s page-turning second novel, ‘Starting from Here,’ in one intoxicating gulp. The story demands it. It’s a mother-daughter wrangle & also our ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.’ Barely pubescent René’s quest to command the stage as a prima ballerina leads her from a Dakota berg to sparkling Manhattan. Along the way, the lonely young woman is half-starved, pawed at and preyed upon, seduced, rejected, and since her body is her instrument, she is ruthlessly judged. Saunders wowed me with her psychological acuity in her debut, ‘The Distance Home,’ and this new offering exceeds that jewel. Brava!”

— MARY KARR, New York Times bestselling author of 'The Liars’ Club' and 'Lit'

“‘Starting From Here’ is a stirring, stunning novel about the desire for a certain kind of life and the quest to find it. Paula Saunders has written an ode to coming-of-age, independence, and transformation that is also an evocative time capsule brimming with memory and feeling. What a wonderful book this is.”

— MEG WOLITZER, New York Times bestselling author of 'The Female Persuasion' and 'The Interestings'

“Paula Saunders ‘Starting From Here’, follows René, the indelible protagonist of ‘The Distance Home,’ as she navigates family and dancing through her tumultuous 1970s adolescence. Saunders brilliantly captures the richness, awfulness, and blooming exhilaration of this girl’s life, careening from tortured family love to uneasy independence and back again. This is a beautiful novel.”

— CLAIRE MESSUD, New York Times bestselling author of 'This Strange Eventful History' and 'The Woman Upstairs'

For media inquiries only, please contact Rachel Parker: rparker@penguinrandomhouse.com

The Distance Home

Paula Saunders' debut novel,
The Distance Home

Tender, searing, and unforgettable, The Distance Home is a profoundly American story spanning decades—a tale of haves and have-nots, of how our ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, lead us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another. It’s a portrait of beauty and brutality in which the author’s compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved.

Available in bookstores

praise for The Distance Home

“In The Distance Home, a family’s story – its past, its present, and (most surprising) its future – traces the intricate, often subterranean lines that connect damage to redemption, creation to dissolution, and the everyday to the eternal, just to name several of its moving and startling aspects. It’s a true, and rare, accomplishment.”

— MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

“The Distance Home is a bracing and beautiful novel about a fierce struggle for love and understanding in a South Dakota family, and about aspiration (both thwarted and encouraged) in an unforgiving place. Read it – it will break your heart and open it up.”

— MAILE MELOY, Author of "Do Not Become Alarmed"

“The Distance Home is a deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family – its promises and disruptions – surrounded by a rich, shimmering, sensuous South Dakota landscape.”

— JENNIFER EGAN

“Paula Saunders has given us a riveting family saga for the ages. The Distance Home is fresh, with a seductive Midwestern innocence, though the book’s outwardly ideal clan holds dark secrets that kept me turning pages into the wee hours. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years – destined to become a classic.”

— MARY KARR

“An extraordinary debut...The Distance Home is heartbreaking and full of compassion while also managing to be exacting, precise, and truthful. It accomplishes what great fiction should: We get a glimpse of our own humanity – a hard-won clarity – through the story of this particular haunted family and the woman who moved on, survived, but never exactly left.”

— DANA SPIOTTA, Author of "Innocents and Others" and "Stone Arabia"

“Set in the isolation of South Dakota prairie towns and then the provincialism of Rapid City, The Distance Home is an exemplary story of what hardworking people suffered in Middle America in the late twentieth century while striving to achieve dreams. This soul-searching first novel offers everywhere that most mysterious and essential of artistic achievements: heart.”

— DOUGLAS UNGER, Author of "Leaving the Land" and "Voices From Silence"

about Paula Saunders

Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. Her first book, The Distance Home, was long-listed for The Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize and named as one of The Best Books of 2018 by REAL SIMPLE. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.