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A Salty Ink Introduction to Lisa Moore’s February (Anansi 2009)

NSCAD graduate and Burning Rock member Lisa Moore is the reigning queen of CanLit. Few writers can match her evocative, elegant way with words, and for that she is a multi-award-winning author, twice nominated for the country’s most esteemed literary award: the Giller Prize.

February is her latest novel, said to be her masterpiece, and Salty Ink certainly thinks so. A New York Times’ Editor’s choice, and a Globe & Mail and Quill & Quire book of the year, February was shortlisted for handfuls of awards, as prestigious as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribean Region) and the Winterset Award, and recently won an IPPY award.

“If you read only one book this year, let it be February, Lisa Moore’s astonishing novel.”
- Chronicle Herald

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her husband, Cal, the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. With her emotionally enthralling writing, Moore shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life — yoga, watching her grandchildren, or helping her son cope with the reality of his pending, unexpected fatherhood — are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really comes at us, with the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random.

From Anansi’s website: “Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile. A profound, gorgeous, heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.”

Literary icon Richard Ford on February: “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.”

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February was nominated by, and will be defended by, Trish Osuch

Trish Osuch is a reader, blogger, and amateur urban gardener living and working in Toronto.

She spends her days as the Web Content Manager for House of Anansi Press and Groundwood Books

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content taken from Salty Ink… follow their Atlantic Canada Reads series.