February Lisa Moore by Lisa Moore 9780802197900, 0802197906, B008UX3BJ6 instant download after payment.

In her moving and masterful novel, Lisa Moore reveals the story that unfurls around two devastating moments in time, separated by 25 years.

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sinks off the coast of Newfoundland during a night storm. Helen O’Mara, pregnant with her fourth child, receives a phone 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, telling her he has made a girl pregnant. 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.

"Moore has great strengths as a writer, chiefly in her powers of description. She gives us the cold, steep streets of St. John’s in its many wintry incarnations and well-observed scenes of Iceland and Tasmania, where John travels, as well as glimpses of his business meetings and chance encounters in New York (where, in a shop window, “the reflections of yellow cabs float in the glass like giant carp”). Throughout, Moore provides vivid, cinematic snapshots of family life before and after Helen’s husband’s death: a foggy after­noon beach walk or an all-family search for Cal’s beloved runaway dog. Helen’s informed, distraught imaginings of the rig’s sinking — when precisely the men knew they were doomed, how they died — have a particular, painful sharpness."  -  Sylvia Brownrigg, The New York Times

Lisa Moore originally intended to become a visual artist. She is the author of four novels and several books of short stories, as well as five works for the stage, and she teaches creative writing at Memorial University, Newfoundland.