Faber seizes Moore's first novel in 14 years

Faber has snapped up I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, the first novel from Lorrie Moore since the Women’s Prize-shortlisted A Gate at the Stairs (Faber) 14 years ago.

Alex Bowler, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Zoë Waldie at RCW on behalf of Melanie Jackson at the Melanie Jackson Agency. It will publish on 20th June 2023. 

"Finn is in the grip of middle age and on an enforced break from work: it might be that he’s ‘too emotional’ to teach history right now," the synopsis reads. "He is living in an America hurtling headlong into hysteria, after all. High up in a New York hospice, he sits with his beloved brother as Max slips from one world into the next.

"A call from Illinois summons Finn back to his troubled old flame Lily, the great love of his life. Together, they’ll embark on a road trip that opens a trapdoor in reality. Just the two of them, side by side again for one last time, coming to terms with all they meant to each other and how they might go at what is left of life alone."

Bowler said: "Lorrie’s is one of the great contemporary imaginations. I Am Homeless is heart-shattering and mind-shattering – a magic box novel, about love, about death, about grief and longing, about how strange we can be, about how our emotions can sometimes reshape time and space."

Moore is the award-winning author of five story collections, three novels and a children’s book. She has received numerous accolades from the Lannan Foundation, the National Books Critics Circle and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. After serving for almost three decades as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Moore is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.