February

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

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

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

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

Luminous. More

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

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

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

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

Soaring. Chatelaine

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

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

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

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

...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

...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

...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 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

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

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

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

An intense and absorbing read. Coventry Telegraph

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

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