Intensely and lyrically written, this is the story of a woman named Anasuya who lives near the ocean on a world not unlike Earth. Her culture is fascinating and allows for special attributes called athmis. Anasuya’s athmis is the understanding of mathematical harmonies. She sees and experiences all the mathematical underpinnings of the world....Individual sections illuminate and provide a rounded backdrop to the whole, until by the end of this finely layered novella I felt as though I had met a fully formed human being—not to mention a number of fascinating characters—and all with a mathematical conundrum of epic proportions with dire import for the cultures of two planets.

It’s an absorbing tale, if perhaps one that doesn’t quite earn all its length, but what I want to highlight here is how beautifully apt its title is, not just because of the many distances that are worked into the narrative — geographic, intellectual, emotional, societal — but because of the way the abstract notion of distance is seen as an integral part of human existence. Distances, in other words, lend Anasuya’s society its sense of completeness; and indeed, perhaps the most satisfying thing about Distances is how irreducible it feels, how Singh mixes mathematical, artistic and sociocultural speculation in a way that feels holistic precisely because it is aware of where those different domains intersect and interact. The distances in The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet are more familiar; and the speculations are smaller, if not more tame; but for Singh’s characters, the negotiation of the two is usually no less challenging.