Range by Dorthe Nors is a novel that probe the distances between loneliness and connection through two solitary female protagonists.  One mesmerizing astrophysicist retreats into the countryside to seek solitude by tracking gamma-ray bursts and researches the origins of the universe and cosmos. This novels revolves around women living on the margins, pushed “to the side of their own lives”, driven off course only to find that wrong turn perhaps a course correction. Brit is her restless teenage daughter and there is her young protégé, Gunn has sent him away to find his own path, yet longs to have him close. There are also remote colleagues and dead loved ones, often in her thoughts and the menacing Gable woman, a local adversary, enraged after catching Gunn wandering on to private property, is intent on putting her in her place.

Range is also about how to navigate the humanmade boundaries of a boundless universe? How to be a caretaker if you’re not a mother and stand apart in your communities? Gunn’s mind ranges over these questions as she splits firewood, walks the forest, solves equations, sits in hunting stands, lies in fields, and observes – the animals, the locals, the seasons, the stars, her memories. Reaching from the everyday to the infinite, from sensory details to contemplations of the cosmos, Range is exploring the inexorable forces that at once draw us towards one another and  indeed a gripping investigation of the many kinds of distance we cross through space and time.

You navigate through a maze, holding clues lightly spotting patterns, sensing that there is more that we are being revealed. For Gunn Haven, the protagonist of the novel who is taking a sabbatical from teaching at “the Institute”.

Gunn refers to being inside “the system” there is an echo of the “zone” in Tarkovskys 1979 film Stalker, where all our questions are finally answered all our desires are met, and have candid cliché-free treatment of big themes, ageing, loneliness, work, loss and motherhood.

Range by Dorthe Nors, translated by Caroline Waight, Pushkin Press £18.99/ Graywolf Press $18, 320 pages.