I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
A novel
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- ¥1,400
Publisher Description
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The 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.
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, NPR, Vulture, Lit Hub
“Who else but Lorrie Moore could make, in razor-sharp irresistible prose, a ghost story about death buoyant with life?” —PEOPLE
“Is it an allegory? Is it real? It doesn’t matter...[It’s] a novel with big questions, no answers, and it’s absolutely brilliant.” —Lit Hub
“[A] triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination.” —The Guardian
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.
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.
