num_pages: 288
description: Lisa Moore's Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of 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.
language: English
title: Alligator : A Novel
titlecomplete: Alligator : A Novel
genres: Literary Fiction, Literature, Fiction, Contemporary, Female Authors, Book Club, Canadian Literature, Canada, Unfinished, 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: House of Anansi Press