Away

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

I’m not sure what the gorgeous cover of this book signifies, except to signal the extravagant riches within. Amy Bloom writes like a magician, capable of pulling doves, scarves, and beautiful (if slightly bruise-mottled) fruit out of thin air.

I just read Away for my bookclub, and I kept telling myself to remember bits to discuss, thinking "This is my favorite part" each time. At one point I clapped my hand over my mouth and wailed, "Oh, no!" out loud, so absorbed was I in the story, which is both marvelously emotional and very deliberate in pacing and structure.

It’s the tale of a journey, and like the tale of every journey, it’s about coming home.

Lillian Leyb is a Russian Jewish immigrant to New York City in the 1920s. Clever and determined, she talks her way into a sweatshop and then into a Yiddish theater producer’s bed. But she keeps waking up from dreams where she’s lying on the floor in her old house, her eyes and hands sticky with drying blood; her family, slaughtered in the latest pogrom, lies dead around her.

Then she gets word that her little daughter may still be alive—a neighboring couple may have taken her with them to Siberia. With the help of a friend and some atlas pages cut from a library book, she sets off across the United States to reach the Bering Strait.

The strangers she meets along the way and the stages of her travel form the rest of the novel. I won’t tell you any more, as you’ll want to discover each one yourself.

This is another book that has made me glad that I live in the age of the novel. Epic poems and fables and chansons, sure, but I love this genre and the writers who use it to tell such wonderful stories.