Love Invents Us

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From the cover:

In her debut novel, Amy Bloom, a National Book Award finalist for Come to Me has written an unsettling tale of desire. With her finely honed style and her generous, unflinching sensibility, she shows us how profoundly the forces of love shape our lives.

In Love Invents Us, a girl becomes a woman; a boy becomes a man; a man grows old and dies; Elizabeth, Horace, and Max know each other, leave each other, and find each other again over the course of thirty years. The need to be loved, the unreasonable and unarguable demands of the heart, take all of Bloom’s characters, young and old, black and white, through lives they could not have even imagined. Unsparingly real, funny, and razor-sharp, Bloom gives us love simultaneously delightful and painful, necessary and devastating.

Reviews:

“The highest compliment I can pay a writer is to say that her work is Chekhovian which is to say that its fine, fierce intelligence is matched by its compassion. This is a rare book.” – Rosellen Brown

“Lyrical and funny. . . . There is a line worth quoting on almost every page of this book.” – Los Angeles Times

“Love Invents Us envelops the reader in a magical dream by turns funny, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet, sensuous and passionate. This is an uncensored landscape where we see the lies by which we define ourselves unmasked. Amy Bloom writes like an angel.” – Thom Jones

“Bloom’s precise, sensual and heartbreaking tale reminds us that the most exquisite of pleasures can be wedded to the most searing of sorrows.” – Chicago Tribune

“Amy Bloom writes about love in prose as pure and polished as river-washed stone.” – Phyllis Rose

“Ms. Bloom . . . writes lyrically and describes complicated emotional states with great sensitivity and tenderness.” – Sarah Ferguson, New York Times Book Review

“Bloom, author of Come to Me, curves and spins and carves around her subject, expanding into exquisite scenes… [a] terrific first novel.” – Elle