Savage: 1986-2011

Fiction. Winner, ReLit Award (Novel). CBC Books' Writers to Watch pick. Nate has chosen wrestler Randy Savage as his hero. As he finishes high school and Savage's popularity starts to wane, Nate begins to see the wrestler's downfall mirrored in his own life. SAVAGE: 1986-2011 chronicles the middle-class implosion of Nate's nuclear family. The novel is about the blurred lines between child and adult roles and the ever-changing landscape of interior heroism. Moore revisits, remasters, and repackages a twenty-five year family odyssey with guts, honesty, and love.

...SAVAGE 1986-2011 is a reminder that no love is easy, and scars might never fade, but they can heal. Better, they may even end up transformed, like so many blue Mondays made into art.--The National Post

Writing in 2009 for The National Post, Mark Medley dubbed author Nathaniel G. Moore 'a writer so far removed from the CanLit conversation that he might as well be writing in another language'--an honour that may at first glance sound like baffled, even backhanded praise, but trust me: if you've got your head screwed on right, this is the best of compliments. So it is with Moore's latest, SAVAGE 1986-2011, a novel released this month from Vancouver's Anvil Press, and which continues to defy the narrative and stylistic clichés of our award-winning tomes while still (somehow) remaining utterly Canadian, utterly Torontonian, and utterly of its time. We read for so many reasons, but if 'social change' is yours, then SAVAGE is a must, boasting a sweeping tour of nostalgia, melancholy, and private, pop-addled history, ranging from the Cold War Reagonomics of 1980s Leaside to the Post-Sacred haunts of late-2000s Bloorcourt. Twinning the crumbling mausoleums of our collective spectacles to a private coming-of-age story like you've never read, SAVAGE judders with vitality, mourning a life lived in the spotlight of art, beneath the menace of family, and ravaged by the forever-cuts of love.--Spencer Gordon