Amy Bloom's Away

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the 1h18m runtime—how could a story this ambitious fit into a lunch break? But *Away*’s audiobook proves that brevity can be a blade. Jill Eikenberry’s narration is the star: her voice has the rasp of a chain-smoker and the timing of a stand-up comic, turning Lillian’s grim calculations (‘*I could be a whore or a corpse. I chose whore*’) into dark punchlines. The live-book-club framing, though, is a double-edged sword. Bloom’s interjections are catnip for lit nerds (her dissection of ‘the mythology of the frontier whore’ had me pausing to scribble notes), but the shifts between performance and discussion can feel whiplash-inducing. At one point, Sheffer’s folksy ‘*Now, Amy, tell us about the research*’ nearly ruptured the spell Eikenberry had woven. The story itself is a gut-punch. Bloom refuses to romanticize Lillian’s resilience—her survival is messy, transactional, and sometimes ugly. A lesser narrator might soften the edges, but Eikenberry leans into the discomfort, her voice dropping to a growl when Lillian barters her body for a ticket west. The production’s lo-fi charm (you can hear pages turning, the occasional throat-clear) grounds the listening experience, though the abrupt ending left me craving more. My gripe? The abridgment excises some of the novel’s quieter moments of introspection, and the live-audience segments occasionally undercut the story’s momentum. Still, for fans of *The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay*’s grit or the moral ambiguity of *The Power*, this is a jewel-box audiobook: small, sharp, and impossible to shake.