Lisa Moore Books In Order

Novels

Alligator (2005)
February (2010)
Caught (2013)
Flannery (2016)
This is How we Love (2022)

Collections

Open (2002)
Degrees of Nakedness (2004)
The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (2012)
Something for Everyone (2018)
Us, Now (2021)

Anthologies edited

Hard Ticket (2021)

Non fiction

Great Expectations (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Hard Ticket
(2021)

Non fiction Book Covers

Great Expectations
(2018)

Lisa Moore Books Overview

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. 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.

February

Februaryis Lisa Moore’s heart-stopping follow-up to her debut novel, Alligator, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Caribbean and Canadian region. Propelled by a local tragedy, in which an oil rig sinks in a violent storm off the coast of Newfoundland,Februaryfollows the life of Helen O’Mara, widowed by the accident, as she continuously spirals from the present day back to that devastating and transformative winter.

After overcoming the hardships of raising four children as a single parent, Helen’s strength and calculated positivity fool everyone into believing that she’s pushed through the paralyzing grief of losing her spouse. But in private, Helen has obsessively maintained a powerful connection to her deceased husband. When Helen’s son unexpectedly returns home with life-changing news, her secret world is irrevocably shaken, and Helen is quickly forced to come to terms with her inability to lay the past to rest.

An unforgettable glimpse into the complex love and cauterizing grief that run through all of our lives,Februarytenderly investigates how memory knits together the past and present, and pinpoints the very human need to always imagine a future, no matter how fragile.

Open

The only certainty in life, according to these stories, comes from the accumulation of moments that refuse to be contained. The stories in Open cover these moments, familiar territory in the hands of most writers, in unfamiliar ways. The interconnectedness of a bus ride in Nepal and a wedding on the shore of Quidi Vidi Lake; the tension between a husband and wife when their infant cries before dawn who will go to him? and the husband’s wrenching memory of an early love affair; two friends, one who suffers early in life and the other midway through these are some of the subjects Lisa Moore treats with her incomparable style. Drawing on vivid landscapes both interior and exterior, Moore splices together the sudden shocks and subtle realizations that enter her characters’ lives, using the piercing imagery and soulful technique that have won her acclaim from critics and her many fans.

Degrees of Nakedness

In Lisa Moore’s first story collection, the joys and distresses of love course through modern day Newfoundland like an electric current. These bright, engaging tales mark precious moments in the characters’ lives against deceptively prosaic settings a hospital cafeteria lit only by the lights in the snack machines, a half built house ‘like a rib cage around a lungful of sky’ and the results linger long in the memory. In ‘Nipple of Paradise,’ Moore jumps back and forth in time between the birth of a child and a mother’s unraveling marriage. ‘Wisdom Teeth’ uses short, startling vignettes to weave together the story of a young woman. With lovingly constructed sentences and lush prose, Moore shows readers that love, alongside desire, can sometimes come softly, and sometimes as an ambush.