I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

What if the person you love most won’t stay? Finn is a high-school teacher on leave, shuttling between a New York hospice where his brother is dying and the Midwest town where Lily—his on-and-off partner, clown, escape artist, and incurable depressive—has been buried quickly in a green cemetery. Then Lily returns, not quite the way people come back, and asks for one more ride. They head south in the dark, talking about the things you usually avoid—suicide, baseball, space travel, marriage—and aim for a forensic body farm where, at least, a body might do some good.

Stitched into their trip are letters from an era that feels both distant and weirdly close. Elizabeth, a boardinghouse keeper on South Sunken Road, writes her absent sister about a charming lodger with a cork foot, a city of rumors and wars not finished, and a crime she decides to fix herself. The past leaks into the present as Finn reads her words in a roadside inn, and the two stories echo—loneliness, care, and what love will and won’t allow.

This is a book of last attempts and stubborn devotion. It’s about people who keep talking to the dead, and the dead who sometimes answer back. If you’ve ever nursed someone, left someone, followed someone, or simply stayed awake in the soft hours wondering how to go on, this story speaks plainly and stays with you.

• Listeners who love literary fiction that blends comedy with grief and the uncanny
• Anyone navigating loss, hospice care, or the aftershocks of mental illness
• Fans of Lorrie Moore’s sharp, humane sentences and offbeat humor
• Readers intrigued by epistolary echoes and history brushing the present
• Book clubs willing to argue kindly about love, usefulness, and consent

Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of story collections and novels known for their wit, precision, and heart. After many years teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she became the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been honored by the Lannan Foundation, the National Book Critics Circle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.