Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Alligator

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Lisa Moore's Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: 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.

  • Creators

  • Series

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 8, 2006
      The powerful American debut of Canadian bestseller Moore does for Newfoundland what Empire Falls
      did for dying smalltown Maine and The Sportswriter
      did for suburban New Jersey. Seventeen-year-old Colleen Clark and her mother, Beverly, can't overcome their grief over the sudden death of David, Beverly's husband and Colleen's stepfather. While Beverly copes by dieting and retreating into herself, Colleen downloads videos of beheadings off the Internet and tries her hand at eco-terrorism ("I wanted to change things," she says about dumping sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank) before running away to Louisiana—where alligators troll the bayou. Madeleine, Beverly's older sister, scrambles to finish her cinematic opus before her heart—heavy with longing for her youth and gradually weakening due to an unnamed medical condition—gives out. Frank, a 19-year-old still reeling from his mother's death from cancer, obsesses over Colleen and finds himself intertwined with Valentin, a Russian gangster with his own tormented past. Powerfully drawn secondary characters—an actress in Madeleine's film, Valentin's lover—add depth to this generous novel.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading