Alligator

From Newfoundland comes a fabulous new voice in a novel where humanity is a bizarre combination of the reptilian and the saintly. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller, the Canadian Booker Prize and regional winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Lisa Moore’s Alligator moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Madeleine, the driven, ageing 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 unpredicatable dangers. Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters Colleen, at seventeen, a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive.