Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2023
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Deceptively slim and deeply satisfying, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home boasts fabulous characters and two storylines — full of love and grief and joy — driven by the snappy dialogue and wit of Lorrie Moore.
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.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2023
"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." —Booklist (starred review)
"[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"
"Thoughtful and witty ... The author's fans will love it, and those new to Moore will want to see what else they've been missing." —Publishers Weekly
"There is much enjoyment to be had with Moore's unique style, particularly the extended, loopy dialogue, replete with wordplay, song lyrics, conspiracy theories, literary and pop culture references. By its end, [the novel] becomes a moving tale of longing, grief, and acceptance." —Library Journal
"[A] triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination." —The Guardian
"[A] wild, haunted-house ride, powered by linguistic panache, descriptive oomph and her trademark wit. Captivating insights into love, loss and letting go add an elegiac note." —Daily Mail (UK)
"Her style is still hers alone ... this new novel is a reminder to prize every moment we get with her on the page."—Independent (UK)
"This is a novel about inexorable loss, about how we can't hold on to anything no matter how hard we try. What a peculiar gift of a novel. This slender ghost story haunts long past the time when the final page is turned." —The Sunday Times (UK)
This information about I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Linda Nylind
Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, 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 board member for the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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