Sukey's Favorite

Away
By Amy Bloom
HighBridge Audio, $34.95
8 hours unabridged, CD
ISBN 9781598875218

Buy or borrow this book!

Support your local independent bookseller

Find it in a WorldCat library

Compare prices at major online bookstores

Lillian Leyb watched as her mother, father and husband were butchered. Her four-year-old daughter Sophie got away, but Lillian could never find her. So, in 1924 she came to America to seek her fortune on New York's teeming streets. That's where Amy Bloom's Away begins. It isn't exactly a "sweeping saga" (the book has only 240 pages), but it sure feels like one, as it moves through the bloody pogrom in Russia; Lillian's immigrant arrival, Ellis Island and all; and her plucky bid for a job as seamstress in a famed Yiddish theater that quickly morphs to mistress of both the matinee idol and his burly father who runs the show. And we're only halfway there. When Lillian hears that Sophie might be alive, living in Siberia with another family, there's nothing for her to do but to go. The same indomitable strength that propelled her out of Russia now takes her on a long, cross-continental odyssey, a true walk on the wild side, as she tries to reach Siberia and Sophie. Bloom writes with humor and irreverence, with deep feeling for her characters and for the nature of love. Barbara Rosenblat, one of our very best audio narrators, performs with perfect pacing, adding resonance and depth to the story and the characters.

The Mediterranean campaigns

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Rick Atkinson doesn't just make military history interesting, he makes it live, animated by the voices of the men who led, the men who died and the survivors who would never forget. In The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson describes Operation HUSKY and Operation AVALANCHE, the controversial campaigns that ultimately brought the allied forces to Salerno and Anzio, then to Rome and beyond, in astounding "yard by bloody yard" detail. You can feel the heat and the cold, the monotony and the bloodshed, the confusion and the true fog of war. His sources are wide-ranging, from diaries, interviews, oral histories, unpublished manuscripts, letters and memoirs to official records and after-actions reports. You come to know the generals—Eisenhower, Montgomery, Allen, Clark, Patton and Bradley, among them—and the GIs, with their songs, slang and heartbreaking letters, and you understand the price that was paid to liberate Italy from the Nazis. Atkinson is also a compelling narrator, reading this vivid story with affecting poise and compassion.


Unto the generations

Penelope Lively's prose is so wonderfully smooth that it carries you into an intricately structured plot without your realizing how finely crafted it is. That smoothness is mirrored perfectly in Josephine Bailey's reading of Consequences, Lively's 14th novel that follows three generations of women. It's 1935 when Lorna meets Matt on a park bench in London. Their worlds are far apart, she stifled by her upper-class life, he a talented young artist just beginning. Their love is instant and absolute, shattered only by Matt's death in WWII. Their daughter Molly grows up in war-battered London to be smart, independent and infinitely appealing. Refusing to marry the wealthy, well-connected father of her child, she brings Ruth up herself, and then discovers real love much later in life. Ruth, now a divorced mother, finds herself intrigued with Lorna and Matt and, returning to where it all began, may find happiness, too. Through love, loss, heartbreak and healing, these women endure, connecting all that went before with all that is and all that is to come.


Bestseller redux

There's a new edition of Thomas L. Friedman's mega-bestseller, The World Is Flat 3.0, updated, expanded with fresh stories and insights. Listen in, listen up and get smart!


© 2007 ProMotion, inc.