• Fiction.

By Amy Bloom. Random House, $23.95.

Grade: A

Plot in a nutshell: Yale creative writing teacher Bloom dazzled readers with her story collection Come to Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. And she charmed them with A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, another story collection that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Now comes Away, a novel set in the 1920s, that is startling, honest, sad and yet funny at times as it weaves a tale around what drives people though pain, poverty, heartbreak and even carnal desire.

The story follows 22-year-old Lillian Leyb, whose family was killed in a Russian pogrom, as she makes her way to America to begin a new life. Early on, Lillian hears that her young daughter Sophie, who she thought was dead, is in fact alive and living with a couple named the Pinskys in Siberia. Determined to reunite with Sophie, Lillian travels from New York, where she works as a seamstress for a Yiddish theater, through Seattle, Alaska and toward Siberia, grappling with the hardships and perils many women faced during that era.

Along the way, she consorts with a fascinating cast of characters who show her much about love and how desperation and determination can help overcome great obstacles. This insightful novel demonstrates how the smallest gestures carry the biggest weight and how a gentle touch can be a lifesaver.

Sample of prose: "The spaces between the trees will fill in slowly until the woods around her are a spiked gray wall, and Lillian has learned to make herself sleep in the endless, disturbing dusk. She sings the sad, raspy lullabies her mother had sung to her and she sang to Sophie: children lost, lovers separated, crops failing, dirges, all of them, and oddly cheering. She sings to Sophie all day. She wakes all night, every time she hears a crackling twig, the feathery slide of a tail over a leaf, the faint splash of something moving in the creek. In the absence of the mosquitoes, her constant companions, the air right around her is very quiet, and the noises, ten feet, twenty feet away rend the air."

Pros: Through fluid, engrossing language, Bloom's story unfolds so mysteriously that the reader simply cannot guess which way it will turn.

Cons: Not one.

Final word: It's rare to read a novel so powerful that it can evoke laughter in one sentence, then turn and break your heart in the next. Don't miss this.

Verna Noel Jones