Riveting nonfiction from multi-award-winning author Lisa Moore, based on the shocking true story of a teenaged boy who endured abuse and solitary confinement at a reform school in Newfoundland, but survived through grit and redemptive love.
Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack's case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts.
The story has parallels with Unholy Orders by Michael Harris about the Mount Cashel orphanage, and with the many horrific stories about residential schools—all of which expose a paternalistic state causing harm and a larger society looking away. Yet two powerful qualities set this story apart. As much as it is about an abusive system preying on children, it is also a tender tale of love between Jack and his wife Glennis, who saw the good man inside a damaged person and believed in him. And it is written in a novelistic way by the great Lisa Moore, who makes vividly real every moment and character in these pages.
LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator (all shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, among other honours); the story collections Open (also shortlisted for the Giller Prize) and Something for Everyone; and the young adult novel Flannery. Her books have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads, been finalists for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (February). Moore is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
“Utterly compelling, Invisible Prisons is an indictment, a courageous testimony, and a call to change. Lisa Moore and Jack Whalen collaborate to bring to life Whalen’s distinct voice and the terrible experiences he was subjected to as a teenage boy during four years of abuse in a ‘reform school’ in Newfoundland. By documenting Whalen’s removal from his family home by the hands of the state, his incarceration in places known to be violently abusive, and his refusal to remain there, Moore and Whalen give language to the violence hiding in plain sight and the effects of solitary confinement on the body and psyche. Whalen escapes again and again, and we see how he is sustained by his determination to be free—along with the love and support of his birth and made families.” —2024 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction jury (Annahid Dashtgard, Taylor Lambert and Christina Sharpe)
“[A]n extraordinary collaboration. . . . Every moment of Whalen’s life is made vivid in these pages.” —The Tyee
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