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by Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore, "Canada Reads" latest winner and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year author, is known for subtly crafted narratives that are at once sharp and impressionistic. Through an acute ear for dialogue and pared down prose, Moore's characters are startlingly present and instantly persuasive. In her new novel, Caught, Moore's dangerously appealing new protagonist is unlike any she's imagined before: a modern Billy the Kid, a swaggering folk-hero-in-the making who busts out of prison to embark on one last great heist and win back the woman he loves.
Caught begins with a prison break. Twenty-five-year-old David Slaney, locked up on charges of marijuana possession, has escaped his cell and sprinted to the highway. There, he is picked up by a friend of his sister's and transported to a strip bar where he survives his first night on the run. But evading the cops isn't his only objective; Slaney intends to track down his old partner, Hearn, and get back into the drug business. Along the way, Slaney's fugitive journey across Canada rushes vibrantly to life as he visits an old flame and adopts numerous guises to outpace authorities: hitchhiker, houseguest, student, lover. When finally he reunites with Hearn just steps ahead of a detective hell-bent on making a high-profile arrest, their scheme sends Slaney to Mexico, Colombia, and back again on an epic quest fueled by luck, charm, and unbending conviction.
Moore's most plot-driven novel to date, Caught is a thrillingly charged escapade that thrums with energy and suspense and deftly captures a moment in the late 1970s before the almost folkloric glamour surrounding pot smuggling turned violent. Ripe with bravado, love, ambition, and folly, Caught is about trust and deceit, about the risks we take for the lives we want and the mistakes we can't outrun.
"Moore's prose is as engaging as her skillful plotting. Dialogue is at once crystal clear and elliptical, and descriptive passages pulse with life" - Publishers Weekly
"An interesting but often ungainly attempt to blend mood piece and page-turner." - Kirkus
"Propulsive, adrenalin-drenched…[infused with] searingly fresh language and sharply drawn characters… This foray into so-called genre fiction by an exemplar of so-called literary fiction sacrifices nothing in terms of style." - The Globe and Mail
"A supremely human book... combining the complexity of the best literary fiction with the page-turning compulsive readability of a thriller." - National Post
"Exhilarating… a memorably oddball and alluring novel that's simultaneously breezy, taut, funny, and insightful." - The Vancouver Sun
"A pleasure to read… Moore's mastery of language and image…sets her apart." – Quill and Quire
"Witty, retrospective, eloquent and exciting." - Chatelaine
"In the creation of David Slaney, Lisa Moore brings us an unforgettable character, embodying the exuberance and energy of misspent youth. Caught is a propulsive and harrowing read." - Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers
This information about Caught was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lisa Moore was born in Canada on March 28, 1964. Lisa Moore is a Canadian writer. Born in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Moore studied art first at College of the North Atlantic in her home province and then at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Lisa is the acclaimed author of February, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and selected as one of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year. Her novel Alligator was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize (Canada and the Caribbean). She is a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, most recently for her novel Caught, which was a national bestseller. Lisa has written for Elle and The Guardian, and her work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, ...
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