“The Measures Between Us is a beautifully written and completely compelling story about the storms that flood towns and the ones that flood human lives. This is a novelistic debut of enormous accomplishment and even greater promise. It is the very essence of a good read.”

—Stephen King

 

“The Measures Between Us connects disparate characters—a couple with a depressed daughter, a single father with an autistic son, a climate change researcher—in a kaleidoscopic fashion. The refractions of these tangential relationships make for a novel that surprises and that illuminates the bonds of common experience. 
…[A] deeply affecting debut novel.“

—Chicago Tribune, "Editor's Choice"

 

“[A] powerful first novel.  …Hauser, a New York Times editor and writer, has previously published short stories, articles and essays, some with the theme of family dynamics and parent/child relationships. In The Measures Between Us, Hauser uses his considerable gifts as a writer to explore this subject again through characters who linger long after readers have finished the book.“

—Toronto Star

 

“An intimate study of detachment and belonging, set against the suspense of the oncoming downpour.“

—Elle (Australia)

 

“[An] impactful debut novel.“

—The Barnes & Noble Review

 

A People magazine “Great New Read” in fiction:
“As a storm threatens a Boston river suburb, a group of friends and strangers provides a moving look at the ties that connect people.”

 

“This is a novel about relationships—how they are forged, why they last and how they develop and change over lifetimes. It’s also about self-doubt, betrayal and the shifting power dynamics that affect people who have committed themselves to one another.... It’s hard to believe that The Measures Between Us is Ethan Hauser's first novel. Hauser, an editor at The New York Times, has published shorter fiction in Esquire and Playboy (which may account for the accomplishment of this book’s more erotic moments). It is an exceptional debut—a tightly structured and enjoyable work of rare flair and subtlety.”

—Irish Independent

 

 “The beauty of Hauser’s writing is that he illustrates each scene, rather than narrates it.... The characters, too, are satisfyingly fleshed out and startlingly original.”

—Bustle.com

 

“Bad weather as a manifestation of emotional turmoil is an old literary trick. But in his debut novel, The Measures Between Us, New York Times editor Hauser relies on beautiful prose and sensitive characterization instead of easy gimmicks. Although a Sandy-like storm threatens the East Coast, the conflicts among an ensemble of Boston-area suburbanites—a young woman newly released from a psychiatric hospital, a therapist who's cheating on his beloved wife, and a single father raising an autistic son—prove more dramatic than any meteorological havoc.“ 
EW's grade: A-

—Entertainment Weekly, 6/26/13

 

“Hauser’s finely crafted first novel entwines the lives of various characters with their inner struggles. As the connections between these disparate elements are slowly revealed, Hauser’s characters find they can no longer ignore the truth, leading to moments of clarity that ring hauntingly true.”

—Booklist

 

“In this elegantly crafted debut, Hauser wields the metaphor of a strained river with care. The swirling currents of these characters’ personal tragedies connect them, but they render no easy answers.”

—The Daily Beast

 

“This excellent novel reminds us on many levels of another important debut novel, Carson McCullers’ “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”… Hauser creates an equally complex and poignant web of characters who, while living in and around Boston, struggle with love and human isolation. The examination of character and interiority, as in McCullers, lies at the heart of this novel. Point of view deftly shifts as needed to reveal the nuances of human emotion. Hauser’s language and imagery are perfectly suited to the fragile adjustments humans construct to life.”

—The Roanoke Times

 

 “A powerfully affecting story about our capacity to hurt the people around us and our imperfect attempts to bridge the divides between ourselves and our loved ones.”

—The Glasgow Herald

 

“Hauser's prose is wonderfully atmospheric; he provides enough detail to project the world he is writing about clearly into our imaginations, without overloading us… . [The Measures Between Us] feels like a serious book that may in years to come be picked apart and dissected for its insights into the human mind.”

—We Love This Book

 

“While the world and weather carry on, indifferent to lives left in ruins, or why, Ethan Hauser's network of people enact the many permutations of love—the difficulty of needing it, finding it, hanging onto it, and, perhaps most curious of all, avoiding it when it arrives inconveniently. In every way this is a love story, and beautifully faithful to rendering it whole.”

—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Nothing Right

 

“Ethan Hauser chronicles the seemingly disparate and disconnected lives of these characters with a precision and compassion reminiscent of Revolutionary Road. We root for these people not only because Hauser brings them so lovingly and honestly to life, but because he structures his story in such a way that we feel even more keenly the longing to connect, and to make sense of the inexplicable.”

—Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World

 

“Ethan Hauser’s powers of compassion and observation are remarkable; each life in this richly layered narrative is rendered with sensitivity, attention, and insight. Most striking of all is how he brings these disparate lives together, revealing how profoundly we are shaped by the forces of family, love, and inevitable change.”

—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine Is Sleeping

 

“Ethan Hauser has delivered a story tightly designed but smoldering with lives lived and sometimes unlived. His sense of place I might describe as loyal because for him the allegiances of personalities to places are indissoluble. I see his characters not only as they are but also where they are and I feel how the measures between them are immeasurable. This grand first novel is an indelible achievement.”

—Fred Chappell, author of Brighten the Corner Where You Are

 

"New York Times editor Hauser’s high-reaching, affecting debut novel chronicles three families in the Boston suburbs as they face personal crises. Vincent Pareto, a high school woodworking teacher, and his wife, Mary, care for their 22-year-old daughter, Cynthia, who has moved back home after breaking up with her boyfriend in California. The Paretos, worried about Cynthia’s depression, send her to a top-line psychiatric hospital on the advice of Dr. Henry Wheeling, a young psychologist teaching at Boston University and Vincent’s former student. In the meantime, Henry’s pregnant wife Lucinda, feeling “suffocated,” decides to visit an old college roommate in El Paso while Henry carries on an affair with Samantha Webster, one of his graduate students. Hope slowly begins to reenter these characters’ lives, with Cynthia, after leaving psychiatric care, being hired as a babysitter by Sam Newell—a single parent struggling to raise an autistic son, Brandon, after his wife Alice’s suicide. Mary happens to meets Alice’s father, Tom Slater, at church, and the two form a close but platonic bond. Cynthia’s battle with depression provides the multithreaded narrative’s most heart-wrenching scenes, while a torrential rainstorm provides a dramatic backdrop for the various storylines to play out.“

—Publishers Weekly, 4/15/13