Review of the Day: Long Distance by Aysegul Savas

Long Distance is a collection of 13 short stories which has been named a finalist for the story prize. Many of the stories are about people living outside their own country; as a person who lived five years outside my own country (Poland, Bulgaria, and Lebanon), this is a theme I have spent much time thinking about.

My favorite story was “We Are Here” about a woman from an unidentified country spending a semester as a student in a small Russian city. 

Every morning in class we told each other what our host families had prepared for dinner. Smoked eel, cabbage of a hundred varieties, pancakes with cottage cheese. For some reason, all this made us roar with laughter. We exchanged stories of our hosts in a sort of competition, observing everything they did like comedians. One of us slept on a foldout couch in the kitchen. One suspected that the “uncle” who visited the family weekly, while the father was away in Switzerland, was actually the mother’s lover. These were the stories we would share when we were back the following year, and in telling them to each other, we made them legitimate—the story of this baffling world that we had seen. (p. 75-6).

In telling the story of my Russian adventure, I would say that these months with my old host were a formative time in my life and had taught me something of the lives of others.

Later, I recounted her with fondness. I described her pickles and soups, her cotton print dresses, her slowly disintegrating mind, as if she were a character from a fairy tale. I said that the old woman had called me Masha and that for a time afterward I’d written to her, signing my foreign name as she had given it to me. I had even sent her a photo album—my dorm room, the dining hall, my parents’ home, the streets and parks of my town, the white wooden church on the hill. On the phone, she told me that my town looked just like her own (p. 91).

kindle and Audible audiobook. 234 pgs. 28 February 2026.