I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: A novel

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
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.

“The prose [of I Am Homeless If This is Not My home] might be her finest.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s

“An exquisite exploration of grief, longing, and our relationship with the past . . . mixing comedy with tragedy, and exploring what it means to be alive.” —Kristyn Kusek Lewis, Real Simple

From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (Caryn James; 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.

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.

“Moore’s exhilarating dialogue is acrobatic, her descriptions ravishing.” —Donna Seaman, 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? ” —LitHub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”