A novel that “does for Newfoundland what Empire Falls did for dying smalltown Maine and The Sportswriter did for suburban New Jersey” (Publishers Weekly).
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year
St. John’s, Newfoundland, 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 anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters.
This debut novel, which moves with swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of these brilliantly rendered characters, examines the ruthlessly reptilian, and painfully human, sides of all of us.
“Glints with wit and jarring insight.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“An astonishing writer.” —Richard Ford
