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In her keenly awaited first novel in 14 years, Lorrie Moore braids two strange tales linked by coincidence and conspiratorial imagination.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME, by Lorrie Moore (Faber, $32.99) Lorrie Moore is an American literary icon, her name often included alongside Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, Tessa Hadley and Joy Williams as contemporary masters of the short story written in English. In books such as her debut, 1985's Self-Help, and the 1994 novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, her unique literary voice was regaled for its mordant wit, acute observation, character complexity and metaphorical brilliance. Every one of her stories has the emotional breadth and sustained imaginative bravura of a novel, most capturing confident, ambitious young women at life's crossroads, struggling with unforeseen challenges and yet still engaging in clever banter.

Although Moore has been prolific over her 40-year career, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is her first novel in 14 years, and was as eagerly awaited as Cormac McCarthy's final literary works. But the novel is not like any of her previous writings, even as it flaunts her characteristic intelligence, lyricism, dry humour and metaphorical originality to the point where her puns pun themselves, demanding extensive rereading.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is essentially a love story, a ghost story and a metaphorical ghost story. If that sounds enigmatic and confusing, it is meant to be. Moore has said that she's enjoying watching her readers figure this book out, which she happily agrees is both "tender and gross". Upon first reading, I thought that Moore had melded the structure of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (quoted in the novel's epigraph) with the spectral quality of Henry James' short novel The Turn of the Screw.