February [Hardcover]

Lisa Moore’s second novel, following 2005’s Giller-shortlisted Alligator, employs similar time and perspective shifts to paint a portrait of Helen, a woman shattered by the drowning death of her husband, Cal, in the historically true sinking of the Ocean Ranger off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1980s. Now in her mid-50s and reconciled to loneliness, Helen sews prom and wedding dresses for a living and cares for her grandchildren. After having spent half a lifetime picking up the pieces after Cal’s death, she has taken the major step of renovating the house, and finds herself unexpectedly stirred by the presence of her carpenter, Barry. Another event has also rippled the relative calm: her son has announced that a woman he had a fling with is pregnant. February is not plot-driven: the back-and-forth chronology is meant to flesh out emotional landscapes and fill in historical details. Although Moore writes with an almost brash economy, she cannot prevent February from coming off as an overly sentimental love story. Cal was the great and only love of Helen’s life, and she spends the 25 years after his death rather tediously reliving their time together and speculating about his final moments. The predictable conclusion, where Helen and Barry come together at a fireworks display, merges past and present in heavy-handed symbolism: “the light flew into their faces as silent as something at the bottom of the ocean.” As well, Moore has embraced the current vogue for removing the quotation marks from dialogue, which has the effect of robbing the characters of their immediacy: they are always filtered through the narrator’s sieve. The book’s most unexpected, poignant moment features Helen sitting in a bar waiting to meet the man she has courted online over the past few months. When he never shows, Helen comes to the sudden, ego-crushing realization that he must have fled after seeing her. It’s a devastating, crystalline moment that would have worked as a short story – a genre at which Moore excels – but its impact is ultimately diluted by the novel’s amplitude.

...exquisitely mindful...All is suffering, certainly, but it's just as true that all is also pretty funny. Moore gets this. She gets life...Moore offers us, elegantly, exultantly, the very consciousness of her characters. In this way, she does more than make us feel for them. She makes us feel what they feel, which is the point of literature and maybe even the point of being human. (Globe and Mail 20091209)

...here is writing that examines the richness of the everyday with an incredibly keen eye and renders it without sentimentality but with profound empathy...Like standing in the February winter wind, reading this novel is harrowing, almost painful, but once you step out of it, you appreciate the warmth in your world that much more. (matrix 20090901)

...Moore has established with her second novel a distinctive voice in Canadian literature. Language in Moore's capable hands is often deceptively spare, revealing for the careful reader layers of acute insight. Her writing in February is characterized by a raw, stream-of-consciousness intensity... (Literary Review of Canada 20100210)

A solid, unflinching, unsentimental study of grief...Moore's descriptive powers, her enviable ability to highlight defining elements of character (either individual or societal) by making perceptive observations, are, as always, in evidence. (Daily Telegram 20100310)

Although Moore does a good job of depicting remembered incidents the novel is best in its intimate rendering of thought and feeling. (Express 20090901)

An intense and absorbing read. (Coventry Telegraph 20091001)

Canadian writer Lisa Moore's second novel solidifies her reputation as a gifted writer whose prose exhibits an urgency, precision, and sensitivity worthy of the legacy of Virginia Woolf. (The World 20090409)

Complex yet clear, compelling and profound, the style is a joy to read and Lisa Moore's story-spinning gift is great. Her people become our people, her richly described settings our own. (Atlantic Books Today 20060901)

Lisa Moore's work is passionate, gritty, lucid and, beautiful. She has a great gift. (Anne Enright 20090901)

Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what's important in life. (Richard Ford 20100310)

Loneliness is hard to write about without become maudlin or cliched. But Moore never errs on the side of sentimentality...There's an economy in Moore's style that shows us how a once vibrant life can be whittled down by pain and loneliness. But, by grounding her writing in the physical world, Moore shows how life's everyday tasks and encounters create a comforting continuity that allows forward movement. (National Post 20090901)

Moore deftly weaves together the present...and the past, evoking memory and grief in pitch-perfect detail. (New Yorker 20090901)

Moore never errs on the side of sentimentality...Loneliness is hard to write about without becoming maudlin or cliched. But Moore seems to understand this very human facility, describing the unconscious ways we sometimes try to avoid feeling overwhelmed by it...Moore shows how life's everyday tasks and encounters create a comforting continuity that eventually wears down emotional pain to allow forward movement...You'll be surprised at this novel's ability to uplift. (Ottawa Citizen 20090901)

Moore pens another triumph...emotional tension, coupled with an acute eye for regional setting and dialect, has long been a hallmark of Moore's work...the hauntingly beautiful February, is likely to turn some heads and hearts as well. (Chronicle Herald 20090901)

Moore's writing resembles poetry...She expertly captures her characters' physical surroundings in sharp-edged fragments of colour and sensation...Helen comes across as a perfectly ordinary woman...But that's what [February] is about: a perfectly ordinary woman whose life is profoundly changed by an extraordinary event. This is a marvellous book. (Winnipeg Free Press 20100210)

[February] is what great prose should be...a work of art...a moving narrative of risk, love, loss, and surviving... (Newfoundland Quarterly 20100905)

There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore's elegant rendering of language...She's distinctive, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters...What she does with language is pure art. (Salty Ink 20100210)

Moore...is one of the smartest, sharpest minds among Canada's younger fiction writers, and she deftly averts the saccharine and hyperbolic in this, her second novel. (Kaya Fraser Matrix Magazine 20090901)

This mesmerising book is full of tears, and is a graceful meditation on how to survive life's losses. (Marie Claire 20090901)

...a stark tale of cauterizing grief, one that left me spellbound in admiration...a well-conceived work of the imagination... (Sun Times (Owen Sound) 20090901)

Luminous. (More 20090901)

Soaring. (Chatelaine 20100110)

Soaring. (Chatelaine 20091001)

It has been a joy indeed to discover Lisa Moore. Despite her great success with a previous novel and two collections of short fiction, February is the first book I have read by this talented Canadian writer. I shall soon be reading the rest. (Gabriel Weston Daily Telegraph 20100110)

...here is writing that examines the richness of the everyday with an incredibly keen eye and renders it without sentimentality but with profound empathy. (matrix )

...Moore, whose previous novel, Alligator (2006), won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, renders sensations with the precision of a Vermeer. (Booklist )