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A debut collection of stories set across the American South, featuring characters who struggle to find love and belonging in the wake of painful histories.  How can you love where you come from, even when home doesn’t love you back?

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, Carrie R. Moore’s intimate collection announces an extraordinary new talent in American fiction, inviting us all to examine how the past shapes our present—and how our current choices will echo for years to come.

Reviews

"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

"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

“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

“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