Where the God of Love Hangs Out »

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. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad.

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.

Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.

Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, "Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Given the range of both narratives, this work of extravagantly fine fiction cannot really be called a short-story collection. It's more of a reunion, or a set of successfully completed jigsaw puzzles. Each of the two quartets has been pieced together into a time-traveling novella filled with hindsight and passion and ever-evolving emotions. This book also includes four free-standing stories that have nothing to do with one another. But even if its format were more commonplace, Where the God of Love Hangs Out would still be something special. Ms. Bloom's characters are uncommonly fully formed, seldom young, some of them well into old age. Yet they sustain the ability to surprise one another—and themselves.

William and Clare

Your Borders, Your Rivers, Your Tiny Villages 3

I Love to See You Coming, I Hate to See You Go 12

The Old Impossible 24

Compassion and Mercy 40

Between Here and Here 63

Permafrost 80

Lionel and Julia

Sleepwalking 95

Night Vision 115

Light Into Dark 128

Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous 148

By-And-By 169

Where the God of Love Hangs Out 181