Published: 01/02/2018
ISBN: 9781783781737
Granta Books
224 pages

White Houses

Amy Bloom

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok – Hick to friends – a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives.

Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick’s hidden love, and of Hick’s unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Breathtakingly intimate... If White Houses isn't an example of the great American novel then frankly, I don't know what is ... heartening and refreshing

Financial Times

Irresistibly readable, fascinating material - Amy Bloom has written a remarkably intimate and yet informative novel of the (secret/scandalous) love of Eleanor Roosevelt and her longtime friend and companion Lorena Hickok, who relates the tale in her own, quite wonderful voice

Joyce Carol Oates

It seems a minor miracle, what Amy Bloom has done in White Houses. In Lorena Hickok's unforgettable voice, she brings an untold slice of history so dazzlingly and devastatingly to life, it took my breath away. Easily, the most intimate, crackling and expansive rendering of Eleanor Roosevelt in print, and more than this, a dizzyingly beautiful tale of what it means to be human, and what it is to love. This is a book I won't forget

Paula McLain

The Author

Amy Bloom is the author of three collections of short stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta, 2010), Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, also published in one volume Rowing to Eden(Granta, 2015), a collection of essays, Normal, and four novels, White Houses (Granta, 2018) Lucky Us (Granta, 2014), Away (Granta, 2007),and Love Invents Us. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.