I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

January 1, 2023

In The Wind Knows My Name, the celebrated Allende blends two bitter tales of separation: in 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is placed on a Kindertransport train by his mother so that he can escape the Nazis, while in 2019 Arizona, Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S. border after they have fled El Salvador for safety. In the latest from multi-award-winning Israeli author Appelfeld, Tel Aviv shopkeeper Yaakov Fine decides to travel to Poland, A Green Land, to visit his parents' ancestral village and is delighted by all he sees until he tries to purchase the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust. With Be Mine, Pulitzer Prize winner Ford offers his final Frank Bascombe novel, with Frank in his twilight years facing the heart-shredding task of tending a son diagnosed with ALS (100,000-copy first printing). Following the Reese's Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Medie's Nightbloom features Selasi and Akorfa, cousins and best female friends in Ghana until Selasi becomes angry and withdrawn for reasons that take decades to emerge. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, her first novel in over a decade, PEN/Malamud and Rea Award winner Moore plumbs love and mortality in a tale interweaving vanished journals, a visit to a dying brother, and the questionable death of a therapy clown and an assassin. A novel-in-stories like Rachman's 500,000-copy best-selling debut, The Imperfectionists, The Impostors sets end-of-rope novelist Dora Frenhofer the task of completing her final book in pandemic lockdown, as she comes to understand her own life by contemplating her missing brother, estranged daughter, lost lover, and one enduring friend (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Schulman's Lucky Dogs, two women (one a U.S. television star seeking anonymity) forge a friendship while waiting on an ice cream line in Paris, but despite a shared history of having experienced male violence, one will betray the other. From Slimani, author of the New York Times best-booked The Perfect Nanny, Watch Us Dance portrays biracial siblings in late 1960s Morocco (their father is Moroccan, their mother French) who deal differently with the era's uncertainties; tough-minded Aicha wants to study medicine in France, while her rebellious younger brother Selim would rather hang out with the hippies converging on his country.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 24, 2023
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.

May 15, 2023
Visits to a Civil War-era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld. "WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD" is Finn's answer when asked what words of wisdom he would like inscribed on his tombstone--by his dead ex-girlfriend, whom he has retrieved from the green cemetery where she was buried and is now giving a lift to...the other side. IT CERTAINLY WAS, thinks the reader of the novel Finn occupies. This otherworldly fairy tale opens with a letter written by the proprietress of an inn in the Confederate South to her sister, describing some trouble she is having with a handsome boarder. One is slightly bewildered, but also relieved, to find the second section of the book transporting us to what Finn, a recently fired schoolteacher, thinks of as "No York," home of neighborhoods NoHo, NoMad ("of course that was where he was staying"), and Nolita ("Didn't he date her in high school? Or rather, junior high?"). On the way to see his brother, Max, on his deathbed, Finn is planning some patter to amuse him, and if you know Moore, you can foresee that this will be some fine patter indeed. But then Finn is torn away from "the bardo of the hospice [with] its trapped souls and the steel beds and alarmingly colored drinks" by a phone call informing him of the suicide of his one-time girlfriend Lily, who had left him for another man but in death will be his alone. The story of Lily and Finn's road trip and their passionate banter about life and death and love is interspersed with more letters from the landlady. Perhaps you will understand why, but if not you can focus on other Moore-ish delights, among them extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body. It doesn't get more elegiac than this.

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June 2, 2023

Finn, a history teacher who has been suspended from his job at an exclusive prep school for somewhat murky reasons, drives to the Bronx to visit his dying brother in hospice. While there, he receives an urgent phone call to return home, where his ex-girlfriend Lily has died by suicide. Visiting her grave, Finn is surprised to find a reanimated Lily there, he embarks with her on a road trip south, where Lily wants to be taken to have her body donated for forensic science. Interspersed with this story are letters from a woman who runs a boarding house in the post--Civil War south, and in particular her interactions with a mysterious boarder who may just be an important figure in U.S. history. The connection to the main story eventually becomes apparent. VERDICT This is an unashamedly weird (but also funny) novel, but if readers can get beyond the morbid premise, 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, it becomes a moving tale of longing, grief, and acceptance.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 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. What's surprising is her illumination of surpassingly strange and provocative dimensions of being. Told in two modes and two time frames that intersect in a dizzyingly unforeseen manner, this doubled ghost and love story begins with the first in a series of journal entries in which Elizabeth, who runs a post-Civil War boarding house, writes with seething sarcasm to her deceased sister about "the gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood." In 2016, Finn--a witty, sensitive, perplexed, compassionate, and subversive high-school history teacher-- is torn between his dying brother, Max, and his mercurial lover, Lily, a therapy clown intent on suicide. Moore's exhilarating dialogue is acrobatic, her descriptions ravishing. Elizabeth is a virtuoso of mordant understatement. Finn is a psychological barometer registering the subtlest of atmospheric shifts as he embarks on a wildly macabre and impassioned road trip into the afterlife. A curious spin on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, with frissons of George Saunders' 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.

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