In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he wants Helen to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.

An astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find in 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. Lisa Moore's work is passionate, gritty, lucid and beautiful. She has a great gift. A tragedy at sea, a miracle on paper...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 20090609 A marvellous book Winnipeg Free Press 20090609

Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of Alligator, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, a finalist for the Giller Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her story collection Open was also a finalist for the Giller. Both books were bestsellers in Canada. Lisa Moore lives with her husband and two children in St John's, Newfoundland.