But in the first of a series of calamities, the boys lose each other en route, and Håkan, instead of going to New York with Linus, ends up on the other side of the country, in San Francisco. And its ability to create lustrous mindscapes from wide-open spaces, from voids that are never empty.It seems like a good plan: the year is 1850 or thereabouts, and the United States is booming. An affecting oddness is the great virtue of In the Distance, along with its wrenching evocations of its main character’s loneliness and grief.

It’s a weirdness to which a reader willingly submits, because of the vigorous beauty of his words and his ability to keep Håkan’s bizarre adventures somewhere within sight of possibility. What concocted is strange and transporting, a story that approaches but never enters the realm of magical realism. And though he murders and maims and becomes a notorious outlaw, he is disgusted, and ultimately shattered, by his violence. He survives and grows, in sorrowful wisdom and, inexplicably, to colossal size. The rebuilt mechanism is his own design, and it moves in unexpected directions: west to east, around in circles, down into the earth, and north to Alaska. Though many of its elements are familiar to the point of being worn out - saloons and wagon trains, Indians and gold prospectors - the novel is not.

a singular and deeply affecting portrait of one man’s life in a rapidly changing world, unlike any old-school or revisionist western I’ve experienced. In the Distance is a brutal, sad, tender coming-of-age story, set in a historical past that feels both familiar and at the same time like nothing we’ve ever encountered before. What Diaz pulls off here is that rare feat of drawing on literary and filmic traditions, only to conjure something completely fresh and strange.

And yet that’s not quite a fair description. It’s a thrilling narrative, full of twists and turns, that sees Håkan make the journey from young boy to 'stupendously tall man' and from innocence to experience – David Copperfield with a twist of Tarantino and Deadwood perhaps, or Great Expectations shot through with a dose of True Grit and Blood Meridian.

So begins a page-turning adventure story that’s also a profound meditation on solitude and companionship, foreignness and home a bildungsroman in the grand 19th-century tradition that is also a fierce critique of the romanticised myths of the settlement of the American west.

Hernan diaz in the distance