num_pages: 306
description: Lisa Moore's wickedly fresh first novel, a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book 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. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.
language: English
title: Alligator
titlecomplete: Alligator
genres: Literary Fiction, Fiction, Unfinished, Contemporary, Canada, Book Club, Female Authors, Literature, Canadian Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 1684
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Longlist, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Scotiabank Giller Prize, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: ReLit Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best Book in Caribbean and Canada
publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat