About Ami Sands Brodoff

Ami is the award-winning author of three novels and two volumes of stories, including In Many Waters, which grapples with our worldwide refugee crisis. The White Space Between, which focuses on a mother and daughter struggling with the impact of the Holocaust, won The Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction (The Vine Award). Bloodknots, a volume of thematically linked stories, was a finalist for The Re-Lit Award. Ami has extensive experience visiting book clubs across Canada and in the U.S. She loves to hear reader responses to her work. In addition, Ami leads creative writing workshops to teens, adults, and seniors. She has also taught writing to formerly incarcerated women and to people grappling with mental illness. Ami has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and St. James Cavalier Arts Centre (Malta).

The Sleep of Apples, Ami’s next book, was published by Inanna Publications, in September 2021.

Visit Ami’s website.

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From the publisher:

In The Sleep of Apples, Ami Sands Brodoff writes with passion and consummate skill about nine closely linked characters who walk the tightrope of survival. Set in a gritty Montreal neighbourhood that’s been slowly gentrifying over the last two decades, troubled teenagers and an experienced psychiatrist, a truck driver permanently scarred by a near-fatal accident and a recreation therapist struggle to build a community and make their lives—and their deaths—meaningful. Fierce, original and bracingly honest, these unforgettable stories speak to the author’s Jewish heritage, her experience as a cancer survivor and as loving mother to a gay son and a transgender son. The stories dramatize that families are what we create, not necessarily those we are born into, illuminating how we all live imperfect lives: We love what we have and mourn what we’ve lost. Readers are witnesses as these indelible characters gain strength, insight and empathy through their struggles and suffering. They each bear the scars of trauma but possess the gift of resilience.

To learn about Ami’s other books, visit her website.

Praise

“The Sleep of Apples is masterfully spare and rich, full of love, quakingly honest. Ami Sands Brodoff’s intricately-linked stories show us the ties between parents and children; a brief love between strangers; a tangling threesome; and a couple of teenagers broken by tragedy—just to name a few of the complex, enduring and delicate relationships in this collection.”

Lisa Moore, author


“The Sleep of Apples is such a powerful collection. Encompassing voices of loss, mourning, birth, and spirituality, an extraordinary group of interconnected characters work to discover their identities. Brodoff’s writing is eloquent and illuminating. Reading these stories made me long to revisit them again and again. You will too.”

Hasan Namir, author



“Magnificent. Ami Sands Brodoff speaks to the realities of our world in captivating and finely-rendered prose that reflects the sure hand of an accomplished novelist. We fall in love with the recurring characters, we are haunted by their pain, we root for them, and celebrate moments of grace when they transcend the suffering that life flings their way.”

Cora Siré, author