Alligator

Lisa Moore’s wickedly fresh first novel—a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and aGlobe and MailBook of the Year—moves with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters mingling in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland. St. John’s is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country....
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Lisa Moore’s wickedly fresh first novel—a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and aGlobe and MailBook of the Year—moves with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters mingling in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland. St. John’s is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters.Alligatoris a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.