February
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3.8 • 92 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns on the rig. It begins in the present-day, more than twenty-five years later, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.
Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile, before we truly come home. This is a profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The story of the man who never comes back from sea has been embedded in the lore of eastern Canada. Moore's third work of fiction (after Alligator) imagines the impact one such disaster the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger has on Helen O'Mara, a mother of three small children whose husband, Cal, dies at sea. The narrative jumps in time from Helen's life with Cal, the accident itself and the years after in which Helen tries to keep her life intact. Whether it is Helen longing for companionship, designing wedding dresses or learning yoga, everything she does is done with a view to Cal. Most scenes are quietly reflective, and Moore's strength is her ability to inject evocative images and expressive tones to otherwise static and overly earnest passages (as in "Is this what a life is? Someone, in the middle of cleaning the bathroom, remembers you tasting the ocean on your fingers long after you're gone.") There's no plot the narrative consists of fragments from Helen's life and while some readers may find the patchwork engaging, the absence of a through-line makes the work meandering.
Customer Reviews
February
The story is told with such love and tenderness for the past, for the never-to-be, and, especially, for what has been lost. It will stay with me for some time ...
Recommend!!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Well written. Tragic obviously but funny as well. Multiple related story lines were all very interesting and unpredictable.