Amy Bloom. (2007). Away: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Amy Bloom. 2007. Away: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Amy Bloom, Away: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

Amy Bloom. Away: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2007.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: judaism
2. • value: Lost Child
3. • value: family
4. • value: 21st century
5. • value: literary fiction
6. • value: Historical
7. • value: motherhood
8. • value: historical novel
9. • value: America
10. • value: quest
11. • value: contemporary fiction
12. • value: Fiction
13. • value: journey
14. • value: immigrants
15. • value: mothers
16. • value: Immigration
17. • value: pogrom
18. • value: Saga
19. • value: American fiction
20. • value: Jews
21. • value: Seattle
22. • value: women
23. • value: Alaska
24. • value: Historical Fiction
25. • value: Drama
26. • value: Adventure
27. • value: Russia
28. • value: Travel
29. • value: survival
30. • value: 1920s
31. • value: New York
32. • value: new york city
33. • value: loss
34. • value: immigrant experience
35. • value: historical novels
36. • value: jewish immigrants
37. • value: pogroms
38. • value: yiddish theater
39. • value: historical fiction books
40. • value: new york times best sellers
41. • value: best sellers list new york times

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Bloom, Amy
   • bioText: Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; and three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.
   • name: Amy Bloom

imprint

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publishDate

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title

Away

fullDescription

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: NEW YORK TIMES
   • content: "AWAY is a modest name for a book as gloriously transporting as Amy Bloom's new novel. Alive with incident and unforgettable characters, it sparkles and illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains... AWAY is a literary triumph, a book-club must and a popular novel destined for wide readership. It is accessible to the point of pure enthrallment without compromising its eloquence or thematic strength. Yet it is also a classic page-turner, one that delivers a relentlessly good read."
2. • premium: False
   • source: PEOPLE
   • content: "With her sly sense of humor and flair for precise, elegant language, acclaimed author Bloom fashions a spellbinding story of courage and unwavering optimism in the face of daunting odds."
3. • premium: False
   • source: ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
   • content: "By the end of this memorable, panoramic novel, Bloom transforms the musts in Lillian's life into a Scheherazade-like procession of cans that encapsulate all the cultural richness that newcomers contributed to this nation of immigrants in the early part of the 20th century. Grade: A"
4. • premium: False
   • source: CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
   • content: "Far and away one of the best books of the year... Once in a great while, a work of art--a poem, a painting, a book--will register in the chest cavity, producing an ache of recognition and pleasure. AWAY by Amy Bloom is such a book... a surprising, tough and incandescent book."
5. • premium: False
   • source: HARTFORD COURANT
   • content: "Amy Bloom is blessed with a generous heart and a brilliant imagination, which is evident once again in her fifth and best book so far, AWAY...The vividness and tenderness with which Bloom tells this story is stunning. Bloom, who teaches writing at Yale University and is also a practicing psychotherapist, has an innate understanding of the complexity of the human heart and in Lillian, she has created her most compelling character yet."
6. • premium: False
   • source: BOSTON GLOBE
   • content: "So vivid and engaging, so delicious in tone, that a reader experiences an immediate thrill, the all-too-rare one that signals: I am in excellent hands here... The language that Bloom employs to tell Lillian's story is immediate, colorful, and unafraid to be plain...It's not easy to be lyrical, funny, and brilliant all at once, and Bloom is."
7. • premium: False
   • source: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
   • content: "Rousing, utterly absorbing... a compact epic, an adventure story, a survival tale and an incredible journey wrapped up in a historical novel cloaked in a love story... exquisitely unsentimental novel about exile, hope and love in its various incarnations -- maternal, romantic, sexual, platonic, inconvenient, unruly, unreasonable, abiding."
8. • premium: False
   • source: LOUISVILLE COURIER JOURNAL
   • content: "A powerful new novel of loss and love, of hope and struggle...amazing...AWAY is a short novel, but it feels packed to the rafters with fully-realized character, with America, with all the things that don't fit inside the vessel we've taken to calling the American Dream...unforgettable."
9. • premium: False
   • source: NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
   • content: "Blom executes Lillian's tale with the same fresh eye with which a master cinematographer captures a familiar landscape...In just 248 pages of astonishing prose, Bloom covers vast emotional (and geographic) terrain, giving a familiar story epic proportions."
10. • premium: False
    • source: PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
    • content: "Fascinating...a tough, engaging book."
11. • premium: False
    • source: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW
    • content: "Outstanding...A sweeping saga of endurance and rebirth. Encompassing prison, prostitution and poetry, Yiddish humor and Yukon settings, Bloom's tale offers linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit and a compelling vision of the past. Bloom has created an extraordinary range of characters, settings and emotions. Absolutely stunning."
12. • premium: False
    • source: KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED REVIEW
    • content: "Summary doesn't do justice to this compact epic's richness of episode and characterization, nor to the exemplary skill with which Bloom increases her story's resonance through dramatic foreshadowing of what lies ahead for her grifters and whores and romantic visionaries and stubborn, hard-bitten adventurers. Echoes of Ragtime, Cold Mountain and Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, in an amazingly dense, impressively original novel."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Elle Magazine
    • content: "A masterly second novel...the writing is spare and tender, with revelatory doses of irony....A novel this gorgeous doesn't need humor, but what's better than laughing off a good cry? AWAY is a story to sin
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 18, 2007
      Life is no party for Lillian Leyb, the 22-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist of Bloom’s outstanding fifth novel: her husband and parents were killed in a Russian pogrom, and the same violent episode separated her from her three-year-old daughter, Sophie. Arriving in New York in 1924, Lillian dreams of Sophie, and after five weeks in America, barely speaking English, she outmaneuvers a line of applicants for a seamstress job at the Goldfadn Yiddish Theatre, where she becomes the mistress of both handsome lead actor Meyer Burstein and his very connected father, Reuben. Her only friend in New York, tailor/actor/playwright Yaakov Shimmelman, gives her a thesaurus and coaches her on American culture. In a last, loving, gesture after receiving word that Sophie is living in Siberia, Yaakov secures Lillian passage out of New York to begin her quest to find Sophie. The journey—through Chicago by train, into Seattle’s African-American underworld and across the Alaskan wilderness—elevates Bloom’s novel from familiar immigrant chronicle to sweeping saga of endurance and rebirth. Encompassing prison, prostitution and poetry, Yiddish humor and Yukon settings, Bloom’s tale offers linguistic twists, startling imagery, sharp wit and a compelling vision of the past. Bloom has created an extraordinary range of characters, settings and emotions. Absolutely stunning.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2007
      Imagine Homer'sOdyssey set in 1924 New York City, with Odysseus a 22-year-old woman who escaped the Russian pogroms only to try to make her way back in search of the daughter she left behind. Lillian Leyb arrives at the home of her cousin Frieda to begin her new life in America. She meets Yiddish theater impresario Reuben Burstein, his actor son, Meyer, and Reuben's friend, Yaakov Shimmelman, and the three men are instrumental to her education. Lillian becomes romantically involved with both Burstein men, but when she learns that her daughter, Sophie, was spared the fate of her husband and parents, the fate that causes her constant nightmares, Lillian begins a trek west, across the United States to Canada and Alaska and finally to Siberia. Her encounters broaden to include other men, a Seattle prostitute and her pimp, and prospectors and line operators along the Telegraph Trail. In earthy, less-than-genteel language, Bloom (Normal ) draws a picture of a no-longer-innocent abroad whose mother-love never diminishes despite the hardships she endures. Bloom reveals the fates of all those Lillian leaves behind, and this knowledge is satisfying, even as Lillian trudges onward. Recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/07.]Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

      Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2007
      With the same mesmerizing grace she brings to her award-winning short stories, Blooms new novel sweeps the reader along from page one. The story begins in Russia in the 1920s. Lillian Leyb survives the massacre of her family and runs away to New York City to live with a cousin. Ever practical, she allows herself to become the mistress of a star of the Jewish theater, andalthough shesnot happy, life is not so bad. However, when she finds out that her daughter Sophie may still be alive in Siberia, she leaves everything she has and begins the arduous journey home. She rides trains hiding in broom closets and servicing conductors. She climbs on boats and walks the Yukon trail headed for the Bering Strait and probably death. But she has to try. Full of pathos, humor, and often heartbreaking beauty, this novel tells the story of immigrant life and the caring of others without being maudlin or didactic. All characters are brilliantly and compellingly drawn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 24, 2007
      Rosenblat, who has narrated hundreds of books over the past 15 years, has a deep, clear, engaging voice and a mastery of cadence and inflection that projects wit and nuanced meaning. Rosenblat is renowned for her proficiency with accents—an important skill for Bloom's fifth novel, which includes all sorts of wonderfully complex human beings: Reuben and Meyer Burstein, scions of the 1920s Lower East Side Yiddish theater; Midwestern WASPS; and Seattle's “colored” lumpen. Lillian Leyb, a 22-year-old Yiddish-speaking immigrant whose parents and husband were brutally slaughtered during a Russian pogrom, is searching for her missing three-year-old daughter, Sophie. In New York, Lillian hears that Sophie has been seen with a family in Siberia. With her dictionary, thesaurus and a map, she sets out on her journey across America. Bloom's graphic, often witty and erotic descriptions of Lillian's adventures include a blow job exchanged for a free ride in the broom closet of a train; her odd friendship with Gumdrop, a “colored” prostitute whose pimp they accidentally murder; and, finally, her moving redemption through care and love. Away
      is a remarkable saga best experienced through Rosenblat's masterly interpretation. Simultaneous release with the Random House hardcover (Reviews, June 18, 2003).

popularity

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Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

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3. • code: FIC019000
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