Amy Bloom, Away
Featured Book
A smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory
After surviving the pogroms that killed her parents, husband, and child, 22-year-old Lillian Leyb has left Turov, Russia, for Ellis Island. The year is 1924, and a young woman on her own has to beg, borrow and steal to survive — or occasionally take well-to-do lovers. But Lillian’s plans of assimilating into American life are complicated when a visiting cousin arrives and informs her that her daughter is still alive in Russia. Lillian knows she must go back, but without enough money to book a ship, she has no option but to head west to Alaska and then Siberia. Hiding in the locked closets of trains takes her to Seattle, where she meets a black prostitute who takes her in only to involve her in the murder of a pimp, and then to Canada, where she ends up in a correctional facility. From there it’s onward into the frozen tundra. A psychotherapist, Bloom is brilliant at capturing the obscure and winding thoughts of her characters, their subtext-laden dialogue as well as the exacting detail that brings her heroine’s unlikely journey into believable focus. What begins as a familiar immigrant story becomes something wholly unexpected — a smart, moving novel that boldly traipses into foreign territory.
