Alligator
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A novel that "does for Newfoundland what Empire Falls did for dying smalltown Maine and The Sportswriter did for suburban New Jersey" (Publishers Weekly).
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year
St. John's, Newfoundland, 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.
This debut novel, which moves with swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of these brilliantly rendered characters, examines the ruthlessly reptilian, and painfully human, sides of all of us.
"Glints with wit and jarring insight." —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
"An astonishing writer." —Richard Ford
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The powerful American debut of Canadian bestseller Moore does for Newfoundland what Empire Falls did for dying smalltown Maine and The Sportswriter did for suburban New Jersey. Seventeen-year-old Colleen Clark and her mother, Beverly, can't overcome their grief over the sudden death of David, Beverly's husband and Colleen's stepfather. While Beverly copes by dieting and retreating into herself, Colleen downloads videos of beheadings off the Internet and tries her hand at eco-terrorism ("I wanted to change things," she says about dumping sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank) before running away to Louisiana where alligators troll the bayou. Madeleine, Beverly's older sister, scrambles to finish her cinematic opus before her heart heavy with longing for her youth and gradually weakening due to an unnamed medical condition gives out. Frank, a 19-year-old still reeling from his mother's death from cancer, obsesses over Colleen and finds himself intertwined with Valentin, a Russian gangster with his own tormented past. Powerfully drawn secondary characters an actress in Madeleine's film, Valentin's lover add depth to this generous novel.
