Most Perfect Things About People

In the mundane desperation of early-1990s southern Ontario, ten-year-old Soccer Beally kills his neighbor with a brick and vanishes without a trace. Over the following decades, his five enigmatic brothers and sisters-stoic, tormented and strangely resilient-scatter across Toronto and its bleak satellite towns as they struggle to reconcile the brutality of everyday life with their fragmented experiences of unbearable and surreal beauty. "With twenty-three intricately interwoven stories that piece together the complex ties binding the past to the present, Mark Jordan Manner's debut novel is a searingly honest, uniquely Canadian meditation on identity, memory, and the nature of violence.