In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. It begins in the present-day, but spirals back again and again to the "February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal. Then, one night she gets a phone call: her son John is coming home. He has made a girl pregnant after a brief, sex-filled week in Iceland. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen comes to terms with her need to remember the dead.

Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives us her strongest work yet. 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.

"There's an economy about Moore's style that allows us to fully see how a once vibrant life can be whittled down by a pain and loneliness that is far too deep to communicate. But, by grounded her writing in the physical world, Moore shows how life's everyday tasks and encounters create a comforting continuity that eventually wears down emotional pain to allow forward movement."
-Ottawa Citizen

"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, I think, the point of literature and maybe even the point of being human."
-The Globe and Mail

"Moore's writing resembles poetry in its frequent use of sentence fragments and the way she builds a scene through the accumulation of images. She expertly captures her characters' physical surroundings in sharp-edged fragments of colour and sensation."
-Winnipeg Free Press

"It is the peculiar aptness, of Moore's images - which are the individual perceptions of an idiosyncratic mind - that fuel her astounding literary gift... Her vision of the world is bitter and joyful; angry and generous. And true. Very true."
-Montreal Gazette

"With February, [Moore] has created an incredibly empathetic character in Helen."
-National Post

"Moore pens another triumph."
-Halifax Chronicle Herald

"Moore’s near-perfect structure keeps the story moving between memory and present-tense mourning, and the Newfoundland setting is evoked with loving detail. Look for February to make an appearance on all the important prize short lists come fall."
-NOW Magazine

"If you read only one book this year, let it be February, Lisa Moore's astonishing novel."
-The Halifax Chronicle Herald



Also, listen to Lisa Moore speak with Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio.