Moll Flanders in America, this epic, intimate novel follows a young Russian immigrant determined to make her way - and find her daughter - in the hip, harsh 1920s.
On a morning in 1924, a young woman rises from the floor of her family's small home in Belorussia to find her parents and her husband slaughtered beside her and her infant daughter, Sophie, missing. When her aunt tells her the baby is dead, Lillian emigrates to America. She is working as a seamstress at the Yiddish Theater and enjoying café society when a cousin arrives and insists that her daughter is still alive - in Siberia.
Lillian cannot stop dreaming of Sophie; she feels she must get to Russia, yet she can't afford the passage. Her only friend, an actor turned tailor, steals atlases from the New York Public Library and sews them into an overcoat for her. She crosses North America by rail, truck, and foot, encountering drifters, wardens, pimps, missionaries, and tattoo artists. From Dawson City, Alaska, she sets sail for Russia. She falls in love, falls in with the wrong people, leaps before she looks, hopes hard, and refuses to give up.
Inspired by a true story, Away is Moll Flanders in America and Odysseus in the Jazz Age: big, wide, brilliantly imagined, unexpectedly funny, and unforgettable.
Copyright © 2007 by Amy Bloom. Recorded by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.
Any new book by Amy Bloom is a cause for celebration.
AMY BLOOM is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, one a nominee for the National Book Award and the other a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.
