Away

By: Amy Bloom

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

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 cafe 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.

©2007 Amy Bloom. Recorded by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc (P)2007 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"Any new book by Amy Bloom is a cause for celebration." ( The Times of London)
"Rosenblat is an incomparable character guide, dancing from accent to accent, never letting up." ( Philadelphia Inquirer)
"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books." ( The New Yorker)

Expertly Read!

The story = so-so. The Narrator = Excellent. I'd buy it again just to listen to Barbara Rosenblat

Nothing Great

This picaresque novel centers around the heroine's search for a baby left behind when her mother emigrates to America following a gentile attack on her Jewish family in Russia in the early 1920s. After making a cozy life for herself in America as the mistress of a gay actor and the actor's father, our heroine, Lillian, hears from a relative that the baby she left behind is still alive. Even though the relative may be lying just to get a piece of Lillian's cozy life in the Jewish center of New York, without hesitation, Lillian sets off to look for her baby--in Siberia. Her adventures make up of most of the story, which is strictly linear but features some well-described situations Lillian encounters in the search for her daughter. This is a decent, but not spectacular, read, as the heroine's actions--which consist of doing anything it takes to get to her child--are predicable. The look at life as a Jew in the early 20th century in New York is colorful and interesting as is the descriptions of her deadly stopover in Seattle and relelentess journey through Alaska.

disappointing...

I never thought that I would see the day when a book narrated by Barbara Rosenblat would be boring. She is one of my favorite narrators and she was not the problem in this book. I listen to many audiobooks and have come to find a distinction between books that must be read to oneself and books that become really good audiobooks. This book may be better on paper. I don't think that it lends itself well to an audiobook format. I barely made it through.

Amazing reader!

For a book with the sweep of character and place of "Away," I can not imagine a better reader--she added brilliant color to the experience of this already vivid book.

easy listening

very surprising twists & turns but I felt transported to the early 1900's. Easy to follow the story as well as interesting to listen to.