With Away, Amy Bloom does something subtly different. Her heroine, Lillian, initially follows the pattern: fleeing pogroms in Russia, she lands in her cousin’s cramped tenement apartment on New York’s Lower East Side, and gets a job working for her cousin’s home-based piece-work garment business.

On a recent visit to New York, I visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Due to the fragility of the museum’s artefacts, it is only possible to visit as part of a tour and I opted for the themed tour of tenements set up as garment workers’ housing. There are two apartments, one from the end of the 19th century and one from 1915, and these are used to trace the history of garment workers and their living conditions. In 1898, the kind of home-based operation Lillian works in when she arrives in New York in 1925 was common. Most garment ‘factories’ were little more than the front rooms of the ‘factory’ owners’ apartments. However, by the time in which Away is set, more workers had moved into larger factories uptown, due to increased regulation and enforcement of rules for home-based factory businesses. So while Lillian’s cousin’s set-up was probably still not unique in the 1920s, it is slightly more anachronistic, if not a bit suspicious.

Garment workers’ lives were hard, but Lillian lands a plum job, making costumes for a theatre. While much more relaxed than factory-based garment work, Lillian still works hard and has the calloused hands to prove it. And she is embarrassed when in the presence of her ‘betters’.

However, it is after Lillian leaves New York that the story gets unusual. In the traditional narrative, the immigrant thrives in the city or maybe moves to the suburbs as the ultimate sign of upward mobility. In Lillian’s case, however, different plans are afoot when she receives information that the daughter she thought was killed in a pogrom is still alive. Understandably, Lillian acts decisively and attempts to reach her daughter back in Russia. Less understandably she decides to travel there by going west, across the US, hoping to cross the Bering Strait from Alaska. While the blurb on the book describes this as a ‘road trip’, this is somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, Lillian’s adventures in Washington state, Canada and Alaska do make for an interesting twist on the typical immigrant narrative, though the deus ex machina ending stretches an otherwise credible narrative.

Away has an omniscient narrator. Though the story is clearly Lillian’s, one device Bloom uses this narrative voice for is to tell the ‘what happened next’ story for various secondary characters as they leave Lillian’s life. While at first this seems contrived, the repetition of the theme soon means that even those who pass casually through the heroine’s life are given a greater humanity than minor characters generally achieve in novels, and by the end of the book I looked forward to finding out each character’s fate.

One topic the genre often ignores is sex. Not so with Away. From an opening passage where Lillian compares her brash (but – so far – entirely non-sexual) approach to the theatre owner looking for seamstresses to ‘hoist[ing] her skirt up to her waist and show[ing] her bare bottom to the world; it is just that vulgar, that embarrassing, that effective’. And it is not just Lillian’s sexuality that is brash. The books includes active homosexual men (again, a variation on the theme) and those who get their pleasure in threesomes or from a prostitute who dresses as a school girl.

While initially this acknowledgement of the sexuality of those living in the early twentieth century is refreshing, it soon becomes grating. Why does everything have to be about sex? Can a man meet Lillian and not take advantage of her, not even want to sleep with her and still be straight? Weren’t there some men in the early twentieth century who were repressed enough not to try to take sexual advantage of a single woman on her own no matter how much they might have liked to do so? (OK, there is one, but the scenes with him still have huge amounts of sexual tension.)

While prostitution and other forms of coercive sex were no doubt a bigger part of women immigrants’ experience than the traditional narrative would suggest, Away quickly goes too far in the other direction to a point where everything becomes about what can – and cannot – be bargained for sex. This undermines other more interesting parts of the novel, and hampers other sections of the story. Whilst a bold and welcome variation on a well-worn theme, Away ultimately lacks a satisfying sense of depth.