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.”

From Amy Bloom, the beloved and critically acclaimed author of Away, comes a remarkable novel about the creation of an unconventional family—a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny story of love, heartbreak, and luck.

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 them 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 gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

Advance praise for Lucky Us

“Lucky Us indeed—another Amy Bloom book. And, if it’s possible, even more powerful and affecting than her last novel, Away. 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

Praise for Amy Bloom

Away

“Absolutely hypnotic.”—The Washington Post Book World

“A master stylist.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Irresistible fiction.”—The Boston Globe

“A literary triumph . . . Alive with incident and unforgettable characters, [Away] sparkles and illuminates as brilliantly as it entertains.”—The New York Times

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

“Bloom joins the ranks of the unforgettable: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eyeless time; Virginia Woolf’s impassivity in the progress of her characters’ lives.”—Los Angeles Times


From the Hardcover edition.

Amy Bloom is the author of the bestselling and acclaimed Away; Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; and Normal.