I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
A Novel
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4,0 • 3 notes
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- 13,99 $
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- 13,99 $
Description de l’éditeur
"Get ready to expand your sense of what Lorrie Moore—and a novel—can do." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post, on A Gate at the Stairs
From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (Caryn James, The New York Times)—a daring novel, her first in more than a decade, about love and death and what lies between and after. 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.
A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boardinghouse. 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 toward life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings, and of the stories we have been told, which take us through a trapdoor on an imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the thoughtful and witty latest from Moore (A Gate at the Stairs), a man takes a road trip with his undead ex-girlfriend. Finn, a recently suspended high school teacher, returns home from New York City to the Midwest after his ex, Lily, dies by suicide. When Finn visits Lily's grave, she seems alive, yet in the early stages of decomposition. She convinces Finn to drive her to a "body farm" in Tennessee, where she can die once more and become a specimen for forensic research. Interspersed with the road trip are letters written by a boarding house proprietress to her dead sister in the years following the Civil War, which Finn discovers while staying with Lily at a bed and breakfast on the road. As in Moore's previous work, her characters rifle off barbs (Finn asks the dead but alive Lily, "Are you ghosting me?") and non sequiturs (after pondering the word tomorrow, Lily asks Finn, "Do you still have satellite radio?"). Some of the jokes are sharper than others, but Moore strikes gold when her characters drop the act and express their feelings, building to a beautiful meditation on the difficulty of letting go, as well as the ways in which a person lives on through the memories of others. The author's fans will love it, and those new to Moore will want see what else they've been missing.
