Love Invents Us - Tapa blanda

'Some people are your family, no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.' Elizabeth Taube, shy, chubby, isolated from parents who are as remote as planets, has to take love where she finds it: at the sweet counter in Frank's Five and Dime; in the mirror at Furs by Klein, where Mr Klein watches as she tries on his coats; and in the longing gaze of Max Stone, her married English teacher. Then love captures her completely in the person of Huddie Lester. It takes Elizabeth, Huddie and the others whose lives intertwine with theirs into places where they never expected to be and into unknown parts of themselves. 'Bloom writes with delicacy, wit and gut-wrenching power about the messy complexities of love, loss and damage' Christina Patterson, Observer 'Amy Bloom knows who to plug a heartstring, how to bring emotions to life on the page' Cressida Connolly, Literary Review 'Bloom moves her prose along with exquisite wit and energy, phrases chinking musically against each other, scenes swerving scarily round corners' Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday 'An extremely moving, personal, almost nostalgic view of love and the body, its beautifully textured descriptions are both reassuringly accurate and disturbingly suggestive' Lesley McDowell, Scotland on Sunday

Amy Bloom is the author of a novel, Love Invents Us, and two collections of stories: Come to Me, nominated for a National Book Award, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly , Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. She lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.