MAKE YOUR WAY HOME

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 to Hue 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.