Ami Sands Brodoff

Ami Sands Brodoff is the award-winning author of four novels and two volumes of stories. The Awakening of Chaya Pearlman, her new novel, centers on seventeen-year-old Chaya, a questioner and artist born into the orthodox Hasidic Jewish community in Montreal. Chaya has lost her way and seeks a new way forward. She knows little about her mother, who she’s been told, died shortly after her birth. When she discovers that this is untrue, she sets about finding her. Questions haunt Chaya: why did her mother abandon her? Is her mother still alive? Where is she? Does she wish to be found? Chaya knows she cannot be truly whole or come into her own until she excavates buried secrets. Ami’s novel-in-stories, The Sleep of Apples, was a finalist for The International Book Awards and focuses on nine closely linked characters who confront crises related to mental illness, mortality, and gender identity. In Many Waters is the story of three orphans whose lives intersect on the island of Malta and grapples with our current refugee crisis. The White Space Between won The Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction (The Vine Award) and centers on a mother and daughter struggling with the impact of the Holocaust. Bloodknots, a collection of linked stories about marginalized families on the edge, dramatizes the threads that bind and the ones that unravel without warning. Bloodknots was a finalist for the Re-Lit Award. Ami’s debut novel, Can You See Me? takes readers into the heart and mind of a young man with schizophrenia and the sister who longs to help him. An excerpt of this novel was nominated for The Pushcart Prize and is a recommended title of NAMI, The National Alliance on Mental Illness.