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Stories
by Carrie R. Moore
A debut collection of stories set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories. How can you love where you come from, even when home doesn't love you back?
In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate.
Artfully and precisely drawn, and steeped in place and history as it explores themes of belonging, inheritance, and deep intimacy, Carrie R. Moore's debut collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present―and how our present choices will echo for years to come.
"The southern locales of these stories are diverse. But what links them all is their main characters' pursuit—sometimes hesitant, often dogged—of peace, or at least grace after personal upheaval. It's likely you'd have to go all the way back to Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson (1968) to find a debut collection of short stories by a young Black writer as prodigiously humane and finely wrought as this. A regional relief map of the human heart." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] transportive debut collection...Some of the stories' resolutions are telegraphed, but the author impresses with her meticulous research (endnotes point to further reading), and the entries strongly evoke the region's many flavors. This solid collection has much to admire." —Publishers Weekly
"Moore masterfully captures the intergenerational experiences of Black men, women, and families, weaving tales of resistance, connection, and self-discovery. With compassion and depth, she explores the tension between longing for home and finding freedom elsewhere. A stunning debut by a writer whose voice is both vital and unforgettable." —Booklist
"Carrie R. Moore's stories are gorgeous, resonant, and startling. It's rare for a new writer to have such profound emotional wisdom; in Make Your Way Home, a single small ripple in a character's interior life can build strength to become a huge wave that crashes over them. What a thrilling new talent, and what a beautiful collection of short stories." ―Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
"Each story in Carrie R. Moore's Make Your Way Home is remarkable, gorgeously written, complicated, deep, continually surprising―and each a page turner, too, propulsive and heartbreaking in all directions. Her characters are so real you come to know them, body and soul. Make Your Way Home is a collection that is much more than the considerable sum of its beautiful parts. It is a book that has the force of life itself, all its hurts and love and betrayal, the little intimacies, terrible mistakes, reconciliations, moments of transcendence, the ways we can and cannot change. It is an astonishing debut." ―Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Hero of This Book
"Carrie R. Moore's arresting Southern stories pulse with the kind of intimacy, beauty, and intensity that the best art conjures. Her characters and their voices linger and arouse, long after their final moments on the page. Make Your Way Home is a deeply satisfying, glorious debut." ―Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
This information about Make Your Way 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.
Carrie R. Moore's fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review,The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. A recipient of the Keene Prize and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Steinbeck Writers' Retreat, she earned her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers. Born in Georgia, she currently resides in Texas with her husband.
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