The stories in Bloodknots, ferocious and powerful, are about family, both present and absent: about the threads that bind people together and the ones that unravel without warning.

Stubbornly original, fiercely honest, and imbued with a sensibility that speaks to the author's Jewish heritage, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with authority, passion, and razor-sharp detail about identity and the longing for a connection in the face of loss, abandonment, and exclusion. Her characters are giants and orphans, society's marginalized who struggle to free themselves from lives spent hiding in shadows. They walk the tightrope of survival, balancing between remembering and forgetting.

Written close to the senses, Bloodknots penetrates to the core.

Ami Sands Brodoff is the author of the novel Can You See Me? She has contributed to Vogue, Self, Elle, and other national magazines and her short stories have appeared in leading literary journals and anthologies. She's received a Pushcart nomination and has won fellowships to Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Julia and David White Artists' Foundation, and the St James Cavalier Center for the Arts in Malta. Ami is from New York but lives in Montreal with her husband and children, where she writes and teaches creative writing.AmiÂ?s latest novel is The White Space Between (Second Story Press), the 2009 Winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award. The novel centres on a mother, a survivor of the Shoah, and her puppeteer daughter who are both grappling with the impact of the Holocaust in present day Montreal.Ami is currently working on a new novel, Faraway Nearby, set on the island of Malta and the Oaxaca Coast of Mexico. The story focuses on a brother and sister, orphaned themselves, who try to help a Libyan migrant who survives a raft capsize. Ami has received a fellowship to The Virginia Center of the Creative Arts to work on this book in spring of 2010.Author photograph by Thomas Konigsthal, Jr.

Ami Sands Brodoff's profile page

• Short-listed, 6th Annual ReLit Awards

In Bloodknots, Ami Sands Brodoff weaves through betrayal, loss, and triumph of normal people facing extraordinary challenges in prose rich and full of texture. Bloodknots is a marvellous collection peopled by unforgettable characters.
-Nalini Warriar

Nalini Warriar

... the force of Bloodknots lies not in Brodoff's frequent bouts of description, but in her ability to cobble character through flashback and dialogue. In these twelve ambitious stories, Brodoff probes and prods our most instinctive attractions and connections. The bloodknots of the title come in all types and textures: they are the ties that bind family members; the body and the mind's perennial tangling and unravelling; and the viscera that accompany birth, sex, and death.... Stories rife with episodes of meaningful recollection ... gracefully accomplished ... the past revealed ... in remnants woven delicately and deftly into the narrative of women's everyday lives.
-Quill & Quire

Quill & Quire

A thoughtful writer who has insights to convey. Montreal writer Ami Sands Brodoff is interested in the inescapable emotional ties that bind families, friends, and lovers. She explores the fundamental truism that relationships are as necesssary as they are paradoxical. They pull us in opposite directions, grounding as much as restricting. Memorable stories are like effective knots--simple, elegant, economical and tight.
-The Montreal Gazette

Montreal Gazette

Brodoff is a genius at creating characters who are wholly original, yet strangely familiar.... And precisely because of their imperfections, they feel entirely real. Like the people in Pedro Almodovar's films, Brodoff's characters are so odd they seem true to life.
-Montreal Review

Montreal Review

Bloodknots is a truly singular and remarkable book of stories. With consummate skill, Ami Sands Brodoff sets forth a domestic terrain marked by the fantastical--a landscape of desertions, treacheries, and devotions gone wrong, richly populated by a wildly imagined cast. Lyrical and disturbing, this is the work of a writer of unmistakable talent.
-Joan Silber

Joan Silber