In her excellent recent essay, “Shakespeare’s Daughters”, Rachel Cusk bemoans that novels about home life are still considered inferior to those tackling supposedly weightier matters like war, and calls on those who fictionalise “domesticity and motherhood and family life” to champion their subject with renewed honesty. Lisa Moore’s February is a glowing example of just how ably this may be done.

Centred around a real event – the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982 – February is the story of how one family is affected, immediately after the tragedy and 20 years on. The novel is recounted mainly from the point of view of Helen, who becomes a widow when the Ocean Ranger goes down.

She is left, not only without her beloved husband, but with the continuing responsibility of bringing up their three small children while pregnant with a fourth. Her voice is set against that of her eldest child, John, who calls his mother as the story begins, 25 years on from the death of his father and on the brink of having a child himself. In this, as in all aspects of her novel, Moore explodes opposites against each other, revealing unexpected truths.

The author’s handling of time is particularly elegant. Initially, she circles between the book’s earliest date, when Cal dies, and its latest, when Helen hears from her son. As she progresses, though, other episodes nudge in, allowing the less stark stories of this 25-year period to be told. We learn about Helen and Cal’s marriage, as well as the relationship that is to succeed it. Descriptions of the couple’s four children when they are infants jostle against hearing what kind of parents they become. Our growing understanding of what caused the rig to sink comes alongside discovering that John has made his own career in risk assessment.

At one stage, John muses that “the present was always dissolving into the past”, and Moore’s writing reflects this, running together memory and reported speech, with observations from the present, emphasising the dynamic nature of memory and how it enables us to rewrite our lives.

Just as the past and present live inside each other in her prose, she makes bedfellows of love and grief, suggesting that there is never one without the other. But the author goes further than to imply death’s ubiquity. She also denudes it of its glamour, giving grief no holy quarter. Helen’s memory of hearing her husband is dead is linked to her recollection of how glorious the weather was that day (“the beauty flooded her pupils and nose and ears and all of her cells”). And the passages that moved me to tears were those where the author described not the rarefied nature of bereavement but the sheer mundanity that raising a brood of children must inevitably bring to even this extreme state (“John would wolf his food and then bounce a basketball. That ball is marking the paint. What did I say about the ball?”)

On the flip-side, Moore reveals that there is decay in life, just as she injects her discussion of death with great vibrancy. John’s child is from a relationship he has ended. And even when Helen finally discovers a new love, her excitement is expressed together with an awareness of her own advancing age and physical decrepitude.

Moore’s wonderful fluidity of approach is noticeable right down to the level of her individual sentences. Sometimes she writes without active verbs, as if mimicking the way that thoughts actually occur.

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.