Lucky Us

LUCKY US — Available in Paperback

lucky-us-paperback

New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and O: The Oprah Magazine

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About Lucky Us

“My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”

So begins the story of teenage half sisters Eva and Iris in this brilliantly written, deeply moving, and fantastically funny novel by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star, and Eva, the sidekick, journey across 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the sisters from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with memorable characters and unexpected turns, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, these unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

Named one of Thomas Cook’s “Brilliant Holiday Reads” of 2014 – Read the Q&A with Amy

 


Praise for Lucky Us


“Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.”

—The Washington Post

“Bloom’s crisp, delicious prose gives [Lucky Us] the feel of sprawling, brawling life itself. . . . Lucky Us is a sister act, which means a double dose of sauce and naughtiness from the brilliant Amy Bloom.”

—The Oregonian

“A tasty summer read that will leave you smiling . . . Broken hearts [are] held together by lipstick, wisecracks and the enduring love of sisters.”

—USA Today

“In an exquisitely imagined novel, Amy Bloom wows…[a] kaleidoscopic take on life in the tumultuous ‘40s…LUCKY US is a tale of a family weathering tragedies intimate and global.”

O: The Oprah Magazine

“Fast-paced, fun and heart-tugging.”

Good Housekeeping

“…sharp, sparsely beautiful scenes that excitingly defy expectation, and part of the pleasure of reading [Amy Bloom] is simply keeping up with her. You won’t know where Lucky Us is headed until, suddenly, it’s there.”

-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“To read Bloom’s fiction is to experience afresh how life is ruled by chance and composed of spare parts that are purposed and repur­posed in uncanny ways—it’s a ­festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that ­resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline ­Mozartean clarity of vision.”

Elle

“A hard-luck coming-of-age story with heart.”

-Kirkus, starred review

“Told partially from Eva’s perspective and with epistolary interludes over the novel’s 1939-49 span, Eva’s world is one of endless opportunities for reinvention—and redemption—if one only takes them. Spare and trusting, Bloom invited readers to fill the spaces her pretty prose allows, with true and beautiful results.”

-Booklist, starred review

“For her latest, Bloom offers something unrepentantly quirky, a madcap romp complete with road trips, secret identities, aspiring Hollywood starlets, and a tarot card-reading fake psychic…At its core, this is a novel of resilience, with the war serving as both a life-changing event and no more than the background noise of an impoverished existence. Full of intriguing characters and lots of surprises…readers of literary fiction and 20th-century historical…will find it an excellent choice.”

-Library Journal, starred review

“This is a poignant book that manages to be funny, an unflinching portrait that manages to be tender, a tough story that manages to also have jazz and grace. Bloom is a great writer who keeps stepping into new territory, entirely unafraid. She is one of America’s unique and most gifted literary voices.”

-Colum McCann

“Lucky Us is a remarkable accomplishment. One waits a long time for a novel of this scope and dimension, replete with surgically drawn characters, a mix of comedy and tragedy that borders on the miraculous, and sentences that should be in a sentence museum. Amy Bloom is a national treasure.

-Michael Cunningham