Lucky Us

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‧ NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTHE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE ‧ Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.

“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 this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times).Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.

Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.

With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though 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, conventional and otherwise. 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.

Praise for Lucky Us

“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 treasure.”—Michael Cunningham

“Exquisite . . . a short, vibrant book about all kinds of people creating all kinds of serial, improvisatory lives.”—The New York Times

“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

“Exquisitely imagined . . . [a] grand adventure.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Marvelous picaresque entertainment . . . 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

Amy Bloom is the author of 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;Normal; Away, a New York Times bestseller; and Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Her stories have appeared inThe Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written forThe New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She teaches creative writing at Wesleyan University.


From the Hardcover edition.