Make Your Way Home: Stories

Carrie R Moore

Book cover for Make Your Way Home: Stories
Book cover for Make Your Way Home: Stories

Make Your Way Home: Stories

Make Your Way Home: Stories

Carrie R Moore

View full details

Description

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.


Critical Reviews

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"

An intimate, meticulously crafted, and tenderly rendered tour through the lives of Black women, men, and children seeking solid ground in a mercurial American southland....A regional relief map of the human heart.-- "Kirkus, Starred Review"

Transportive.... the author impresses with her meticulous research.... This solid collection has much to admire.-- "Publishers Weekly"

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

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

With pitch-perfect attention to place, belonging, and the reverberations of history through several generations of Black men, women, and families in the American South, Make Your Way Home is a collection that moved me to my core. Carrie R. Moore conjures the complicated longing for home and connection with nuance, compassion, and grace. In the story 'The Happy Land, ' our protagonist maintains, 'It was nearly impossible to have everything you wanted in one place, at one time, prolonged.' This book is a fervent exploration of this impossibility, giving space to the desire for true belonging and abundance from which this search takes root. A powerful meditation on ancestral inheritance and contemporary love, Make Your Way Home is an extraordinary and luminous debut by a singular talent.--Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare

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

Remarkable.... [an] intense focus on family ties, vivid Southern setting and confident narrative voice.-- "Washington Post, Best Paperback in July"

Moody, evocative.-- "Atlanta Journal Constitution"

Beautifully written.-- "The Root, A Most Anticipated Black Book of Summer"

Her spectacular debut collection, Make Your Way Home, encompasses much more than just keen attention to place. The Black men, women, and families orbiting these stories are reckoning with generational inheritance and trauma, romantic and erotic love, ideas of faith and freedom.-- "Poets & Writers"

Compelling.... The settings of Moore's stories act as characters in their own right, their tangled pasts forming the backdrop for daily living.-- "Austin Chronicle"

Moore tenderly writes with the precision of a surgeon's tool, marking out the cleanest of cuts, opening the reader to redefine the capabilities and realities of these characters' homes and of our own.-- "Clarion Ledger"

Moore's talent is unmistakable.-- "Ms. Magazine, Best Book of July"

Publishing Information

Publisher: Tin House Books
Pub date: 2025-07-15
Length: 336 pages

The Allstora Membership

Membership Perks:

  • Save 30% on all online store purchases
  • Exclusive access to author's content
  • You pay less, but authors still earn double

Membership Terms:

First Month: $0.00
Monthly price: $5.00
  • To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
  • One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.