DESCRIPTION

From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (New York Times)--a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.

Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart

A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all...

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

REVIEWS

"Moore's sterling literary reputation is anchored most firmly to her short stories, but in her long-awaited fourth novel, her prose is just as breathtakingly crystalline, her humor wily and piquant . . . Moore's exhilarating dialogue is acrobatic, her descriptions ravishing . . . A curious spin on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, with frissons of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Moore's unnerving, gothic, acutely funny, lyrically metaphysical, and bittersweet tale is an audacious, mind-bending plunge into the mysteries of illness, aberration, death, grief, memory, and love." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Moore is revered for her wit, and fans will not be disappointed by the novel's dark humor. The prose might be her finest." —Claire Messud, Harper's

"[Moore] manages the impossible in her writing: every other sentence is a gut-punch or the funniest line you've ever read, and it coheres into some of the truest writing about life--for what is life if not constantly either hilarious or devastating, and often both? I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a ghost story, a love story, a family elegy, and a search for answers both tangible and ephemeral: it's the world of Lorrie Moore, beckoning us back in." —LitHub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2023"

"Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn't matter. Exploring sibling love, death, and longing, it's a novel with big questions, no answers, and it's absolutely brilliant." —Emily Firetog, Lit Hub, "The 28 Novels You Need to Read This Summer"