Bloom, Amy, (Away [h, Random House, 2007]) 978-1400063567 [pb, Granta Books, 2008] 978-1847080134 [In her breakout historical novel Away, the entire plot is propelled by illegal acts and underground networks. The protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is a Russian-Jewish immigrant fleeing a horrific pogrom. To survive and fund an impossible cross-continental journey to find her missing daughter, she actively engages in a world of vice. Rather than being a passive victim, Lillian engages in sexual compromises with a Yiddish theater impresario and his son simultaneously. As she travels west, she falls in with deep-underworld figures, including an ambitious prostitute. Her journey takes a dark, noir-like turn when she helps cover up a fatal stabbing and participates in a robbery to steal the dead man’s money. Her quest eventually lands her in an Alaskan women’s prison, solidifying the narrative framework of a fugitive on the run.
United States · Fiction author
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom (born 1953 in New York City and resides in Connecticut) [She has balanced a highly successful career as both a practicing clinical psychotherapist and a literary writer for over four decades. Her academic background includes a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.S.W. from Smith College. She published her debut short story collection, Come to Me, in 1993 at the age of 40. Her bibliography spans acclaimed novels including Away and Lucky Us, as well as numerous short story collections. In 2022, she published the deeply personal, bestselling memoir In Love, which chronicled her late husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and their journey to Switzerland for legal accompanied suicide. Beyond books, Bloom has written for The New Yorker and Vogue, and created, wrote, and ran the 2007 Lifetime television drama series State of Mind. Though she is known primarily as a literary historical fiction author rather than a genre thriller novelist, her works explicitly feature crime, illicit underworlds, and moral ambiguity as core narrative drivers of her Jewish fiction. She subverts traditional narratives of victimization to explore Jewish survival through unlawful means. - GoogleAI]
Bloom, Amy, (Lucky Us [hc, Random House, 2014] 978-1400067244 [pb, Random House, 2015] 978-0812978940 [Here Bloom explores the mid-20th-century Jewish-American experience through the lens of con artistry and shifting identities. The main characters—half-sisters Iris and Eva—navigating a landscape of scandals and betrayals, literally kidnap (or “liberate”) a young boy named Danny from a Jewish orphanage. The characters reinvent themselves through stolen cars, forged identities, and active deception. Bloom uses the crime of fraud not to condemn her characters, but to highlight how marginalized people, particularly Jewish survivors, had to break societal laws to forge alternative family structures.
Bloom, Amy, (Blunt Instrument [hc, The Mysterious Press, 2026] 978-1613167601 [This book marks Bloom’s first foray into a direct “whodunnit” format, but the only Jewish thing about it is its author]
In sum, Bloom rejects the trope of the saintly, suffering immigrant. Instead, she utilizes crime as a practical, almost casual mechanism for survival (Az me muz, ken men — “When one must, one can”). In her universe, Jewish identity and criminality intersect when the law of the land fails to protect the individual, forcing her characters to operate in the gray zones of the law to achieve justice, family, and safety. – Google/AI]