February

February

Summary

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. Helen O'Mara, pregnant with her fourth child, receives a call telling her that her husband, Cal, has drowned.

A quarter of a century later, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son, John, calling from another time zone to tell her that he has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what to do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help.

With grace and precision and an astonishing ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the story that unfurls around those two moments.

Reviews

  • Lisa Moore's work is passionate, gritty, lucid and beautiful. She has a great gift
    Anne Enright

About the author

Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of February, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, selected as one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and winner of Canada Reads 2013. Her short story collection Open was a finalist for the Giller Prize, as was her first novel Alligator, which also won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Caught was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
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