Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned - natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience - this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to Geo[...]

National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom has written a tale of growing up that is sharp and funny, rueful and uncompromisingly real. A chubby girl with smudged pink harlequin glasses and a habit of stealing Heath Bars from the local five-and-dime, Elizabeth Taube is the only child of parents whose in[...]

Journalist, psychotherapist and novelist Amy Bloom explores sex and gender through portraits of people who are widely considered not normal - transsexuals, crossdressers, hermaphrodites - a group of people larger and more 'normal' than most of us would imagine. There are men like Hale, a 'regular, m[...]

"NEW YORK TIMES "BESTSELLER
""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 [...]

With the publication in 1989 of her first novel, "The Joy Luck Club", Amy Tan was immediately recognized as a major contemporary novelist. Her work explores the lives of the women in four Chinese-American families and the daughters who struggle to fulfill or reject the cultural and familial expectat[...]

Revitalises the American road trip novel, from the perspective of a vulnerable but spirited woman. This book paints an earthy and surprising picture of 1920s America, its smells and textures, its population of drifters and con artists, pimps and prostitutes. It is epic in sweep, but intimate and psy[...]

A thrilling and resonant novel from the author of Away, about loyalty, ambition, and the pleasures and perils of family, set in 1940s America[...]