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In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowHomebodies
A Novel
Narrator
Marcella Cox
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
10 hours 28 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Tremendous! Mickey’s coming-of-age story is equal parts career decisions and relationship choices. She’s a Black woman in the publishing industry, a writer, who is also a queer woman. Mickey’s story will truly speak to those two demographics but will be so relatable to many. You’ll nod along, get teary-eyed, and oh … not to be forgotten, prepare to be heavily entertained with the intimate details! She checks all the boxes of a great book. I’m an official fan of Tembe! (Marcella Cox’s performance on Libro.fm was spellbinding. She has the voice—and the talent—we all want from an audiobook experience).”
— Andrea • Main Street Books Davidson
""[A] sharp, charming and passionate debut."" —New York Times Book Review
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Elle, USA Today, Bustle, Ebony, Harper’s Bazaar, PopSugar, New York Post, The Skimm, and The Millions.
A Best Book of 2023 by Marie Claire, Esquire, Vogue, them, Autostraddle, Betches, Gay Times, and Cosmopolitan.
An insightful, propulsive, and deeply sexy debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and pens a searing manifesto about racism in the industry.
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey’s well on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Everything finally seems to be falling into place—until she finds out she’s being replaced.
Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism she’s endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, even from her usually-encouraging girlfriend, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is, she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run: her hometown.
Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her hometown—and the flirtation of a former flame—but she soon learns that you can’t outrun your past. In the newfound quiet, she is forced to reflect on the sacrifices she’d made for an industry that never loved her back and pick up the pieces of the life she thought she’d left behind for good. After all, when the walls of success you’ve carefully built around yourself come crumbling down, what—and who—are you left with?
A meditation on identity, self-worth and the toll of corporate racism, Homebodies is a portrait of modern Black womanhood with a protagonist you won’t soon forget.
Tembe Denton-Hurst (known on the internet as @tembae) is a book-obsessed beauty and culture writer and author. Currently, she works as a staff writer at New York magazine’s The Strategist, where she covers beauty, lifestyle, and books. When she’s not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens, where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Stella and Dakota. Homebodies is her debut novel.
