Make Your Way Home: Stories

by Carrie R. Moore Narrated by Khaya Fraites, William DeMeritt

Overview

“Gorgeous, resonant, and startling.”-Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

“Glorious.”-Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Lauren Groff

"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."

A Most Anticipated Black Book of Summer The Root

"Beautifully written."

Elizabeth McCracken

"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."

Booklist

"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."

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

"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."

Deesha Philyaw

"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."

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-05-16
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.

This stirring collection of 11 short stories is a prism of contemporary African American life stalked by history, public and private. For example: In the opening story, “When We Go, We Go Downstream,” Ever, a native son of Texas, is determined to overcome a multigenerational curse to marry the woman he loves, despite long—and exasperating—odds. In “All Skin Is Clothing,” Brayden, a young Kentucky boy, struggles to recover from the trauma of gunfire bursting into his home. “Naturale” is emblematic of Moore’s command of intricate detail, emotional nuance, and tension as she inhabits the voice of Cherie, a Charleston-based hairstylist reassembling her marriage shattered by her husband’s affair with a woman whose hair she is now determined to treat as well as any other customer’s. “The Happy Land” is set in the mountains of western North Carolina where Gideon, a carpenter like his deeply religious father, anxiously risks driving through a heavy snowstorm to look in on his Pa, from whom he has been estranged since his marriage to another man. The southern locales of these stories are diverse. But what links them all is their main characters’ pursuit—sometimes hesitant, often dogged—of peace, or at least grace after personal upheaval. It’s likely you’d have to go all the way back toHue and Cry by James Alan McPherson (1968) to find a debut collection of short stories by a young Black writer as prodigiously humane and finely wrought as this.

A regional relief map of the human heart.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940195797454
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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