FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews FebruaryBy Lisa Moore, Chatto, 307pp, £12.99

EVERY DISASTER claims more than the actual victims. Helen has been in mourning for 30 years since the night her husband, Cal, was lost at sea when the oil rig he was working on disappeared into the icy ocean. A phone call telling her to listen to the radio reports changed her life. Then pregnant with her fourth child, she raised her children alone, lived, just about, but never forgot. Many years later the phone rings again in the middle of the night. This time, it is her adult son, John, seeking advice on a huge decision.

It sounds feeble to describe Lisa Moore's extraordinary, unusually philosophical and human novel as yet another great Canadian book, but it is, that and far more. It is a bold, honest and realistic story that evokes real life; a story about an ordinary woman, not a hero, not a saint, but a recognisable character who walks into the reader's life with a quiet insistence. Her memories are beginning to crowd into her head. Her waking moments are increasingly dominated by images from the past. She is 56 and wonders where her life has gone. The intensity of Moore's depth of understanding is remarkable. "You see your life but it's as though you are behind a glass partition and the sparks fly up and you can not feel them." It is a passionate work drawing on the Ocean Rangertragedy on Valentine's night 1982 when all 84 men working on the rig died without a hope of rescue, yet the urgency is controlled, deliberate. There is no hysteria and even less melodrama, only all the doubts that come with loss and age and loneliness. Above all, there are the ever changing stages of motherhood and how a mother eventually becomes a burden on her children. Moore shares a deal in common with Carol Shields, yet is less ironic and more physical. Her novel is a tougher variation of the fiction of Alice Hoffman. There is no whimsy; the romance is bitter-sweet. Moore's prose is precise, never laboured and always, and this is the crucial point, convincing. Moore describes the everyday with vivid clarity, while at times effortlessly shifting into a more heightened, lyric language which is never forced. This is a novel that needed to be written in the third person and Moore has done so with such authority. Much of its power emits from the slight sense of distance she establishes between Helen and the narrative voice.

Set in Newfoundland the story moves in waves through time as it now exists in Helen’s mind. We never find out about the person she was before she met Cal. It doesn’t matter; her closest friend is her older sister, Louise, a lively widow who works hard at keeping Helen alert, involved. Louise advises her to renovate her home before it gets too rundown. Together, they have cohesion and Moore avoids having information about the past trickle out.

Helen does not set out to be complicated, Moore is presenting a life as lived, as it was before the night of the disaster, and as it became once tragedy struck. Helen exists as two people, the girl who married Cal at 20 and became a mother; and the older woman, the widow, who was left with the pieces. She has never forgotten Cal, nor has she abandoned her younger self. “Somehow Helen had picked up the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she’d handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours.” We first see her as a grandmother comparing her grandson staring “transfixed” at a bubblegum dispenser with her son John at that age. “How desperately her son had wanted everything when he was a kid.’’ She is enjoying her two grandchildren and still remembers battles with her son and daughters, including the teenage pregnancy that produced one of those grandchildren.

Helen the survivor is caught in a limbo. "I'm a young fifty-six, Helen thinks. Her grandchildren need her. She plays bridge..Her sewing gives her satisfaction." She makes wedding dresses to suit all types of brides. "Helen has mastered loneliness; nobody thinks of her as lonely any more." But she is and Moore, in telling Helen's story, creates a devastatingly accurate study of loneliness. All the while her awareness of her son and the remote man he has become, lingers in the background. Running parallel to Helen's search for meaning, is a more immediate situation. Having had a romantic week in Iceland with a young woman several months earlier, John is informed that he is about to become a father. Jane, an academic, has decided against lone parenthood and contacts him. This subplot is the only weakness in a rich novel. Possibly because it almost treads as an afterthought, so compelling is Helen. Her children are part of the person Helen is, and she recalls, with some guilt when the then five-year-old John had asked her: "Do you still dream when you're dead?" Her reply had been a blunt one. "When you're dead, you're dead. There's nothing else. Absolutely nothing." The narrative continues: "She forgot she was speaking to a child of five." Such clarity reinforces an unforgettable novel. Aware she is envying the workman his other life as he answers calls on his mobile phone she is struck by the thought that she was young when Cal had died. "And at first you think you will not be alone forever...The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever...The future is the short end of the stick." For all the candid realism, this is not a bleak novel. Moore, the author of Alligatorand a short story collection, Open, is a wonderful writer, tough yet subtle as a whisper, as is this singular work. Midway through FebruaryHelen, considering online dating, asks herself "what she could offer; what she could share. She wanted to say: I am so bloody lonely it doesn't matter who you are or what you are, I am capable of loving you." Many writers struggle to capture the essence of emotion be it grief or longing, articulated so profoundly here. In Helen, an Everywoman without clichés, Moore has defined the struggle to live, to feel and to hope.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times