Alligator

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