Alligator

Book:	Alligator: A Novel
Author:	Lisa Moore
Honors:	2005 Giller Prize shortlist Score: 6.55
Genres:	Mystery/Suspense books Fiction books
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press

Lisa Moore’s Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: North Atlantic Gothic. The story moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland—a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle each other in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, lust, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption.

Meet Madeleine, the driven aging filmmaker whose mission is to complete a Bergmanesque magnum opus before she dies; Frank, a young man of innocence and determination whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers; Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters; and Colleen, at seventeen a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive.

In these pages humanity is a bizarre combination of the reptilian and the saintly. Listen to its heartbeat, and be moved—and delighted.

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