We study the problem of minimizing a sum of convex objective functions, where the components of the objective are available at different nodes of a network and nodes are allowed to only communicate with their neighbors. The use of distributed gradient methods is a common approach to solve this problem. Their popularity notwithstanding, these methods exhibit slow convergence and a consequent large number of communications between nodes to approach the optimal argument because they rely on first-order information only. This paper proposes the network Newton (NN) method as a distributed algorithm that incorporates second-order information. This is done via distributed implementation of approximations of a suitably chosen Newton step. The approximations are obtained by truncation of the Newton step's Taylor expansion. This leads to a family of methods defined by the number K of Taylor series terms kept in the approximation. When keeping K terms of the Taylor series, the method is called NN