About The Book

Lisa Moore, latest winner of Canada Reads and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year author, is known for subtly crafted narratives that are at once sharp and impressionistic. In her new novel, Caught, Moore’s disarmingly appealing new protagonist is unlike any she’s imagined before: a modern-day 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.

Twenty-five-year-old David Slaney, locked up on charges of marijuana possession, has escaped his cell and sprinted to the highway. There, a friend of his sister and transported to a strip bar picks him up, 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.

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.

Praise

“Lisa Moore’s work is passionate, gritty, lucid, and beautiful. She has a great gift.” —Anne Enright

“Quintessential Moore: precise, compressed, intimately rhythmic, mesmerizingly smart.” —Leah Hager Cohen, The Globe and Mail

“Moore combines the propulsive storytelling of a beach-book thriller with the skilled use of language and penetrating insights of literary fiction. She pulls it off seamlessly, creating a vivid, compulsively readable tale that will have you searching out the Newfoundlander’s previous works—including 2005’s Giller Prize-nominated Alligator and 2010’s February, which won the ‘Canada Reads’ competition—if you aren’t already familiar with them.” —Penthouse

“Outstanding . . . Surprising and superb . . . A literary adventure story . . . Gripping, detailed, and wholly convincing . . . A supremely human book . . . combining the complexity of the best literary fiction with the page-turning compulsive readability of a thriller.” —National Post

Awards

An Amazon Book of the Month Selection (February 2014)

Excerpt

He’d broken out of prison after four years and he was going back to Colombia. He’d learned from the first trip down there, the trip that had landed him in jail, that the most serious mistakes are the easiest to make. There are mistakes that stand in the center of an empty field and cry out for love.

The largest mistake, that time, was that Slaney and Hearn had underestimated the Newfoundland fishermen of Capelin Cove. The fishermen had known about the caves the boys had dug for stashing the weed. They’d seen the guys with their long hair and shovels and picks drive in from town and set up tents in an empty field. They’d watched them down at the beach all day, heard them at night with their guitars around the bonfire. The fishermen had called the cops. Slaney and the boys had mistaken idle calculation for a blind eye and they had been turned in.

And they’d mistaken the fog for cover but it was an unveiling. Slaney and Hearn had lost their bearings in a dense fog, after sailing home from Colombia. They were just a half-mile off shore with two tons of marijuana on board and they’d required assistance

There were mistakes and there was a dearth of luck when they had needed just a little. A little luck would have seen them through the first trip despite their dumb moves.