I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
'The most irresistible contemporary American writer.' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £17.99
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- £17.99
Publisher Description
'A triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.' Guardian
'Strange and hilarious and so, so sharp.' Monica Heisey
'When a book reaches out and speaks to a reader so clearly, one can hardly do anything but recommend it in the highest terms.' Spectator
A New Statesman, New Yorker and Financial Times Book of the Year.
From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore's new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.
High up in a New York City hospice, Finn sits with his beloved brother Max, who is slipping from one world into the next. But when a phone call summons Finn back to a troubled old flame, a strange journey begins, opening a trapdoor in reality. It will prompt a questioning of life and death, grief and the past, comedy and tragedy, and the diaphanous separations that lie between them all.
'Moore writes with such panache, such extraordinary perception and wit, that not a single sentence is wasted.' Elizabeth Day
'Witty, but never merely clever, and tender without sentimentality.' Hilary Mantel
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.
