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Read an excerpt from Afterall

Vital Statistics

1-897142-01-3
$19.95 C | $14.95 US
5.5" x 8.5" hc w/dj
120 pages
March 2005

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Afterall
by Lee Kvern

 

Lee Kvern's spirited, funny and pognant first novella Afterall takes us for one night into the plush world of Vancouver's Kitsilano in a kind of literary equivalent of Martin Scosese's Soho nightmare film, After Hours. … The novella’s saucy voice generates real narrative pull and neatly folds together high comedy and social satire … In its arch observations and descriptions of lives structured to fend off oncroaching ennui, the novella is also an accurate snapshot of the canker that lies at the heart of the hip, urbane life of middle-class Canada.
—Christopher Wiebe, Vue

At a dinner party, Beth – thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on – impulsively announces that she’s going to spend a night on Vancouver’s mean streets “in commiseration of the homeless.” Unexpectedly, her hosts’ son Mason – nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can’t speak in company – whispers in his mother’s ear that he wants to go with her. Mason’s parents, good limousine liberals that they are, reluctantly allow him to go. Disaster, of course, ensues.
So begins this fast-paced, tightly wound, funny and quirky first novel from a fresh new voice in Canadian fiction. The action follows a well-meaning but ultimately misguided woman through one night on the streets as she frantically searches for the boy she has lost, ruminates on the shopping cart as a status symbol, loses her shoes, meets a writer, knocks herself out cold, discovers romaine lettuce as a hair accessory, and maybe – just maybe – falls in love after all.

Afterall is a brilliant homeless comedy of errors, a midsummer's night of near-misses. Kvern's Dairyland maid and her borrowed child wander the starry streets of a dream-Vancouver in this inspired morality tale that is funny, scary, and bright as a midnight neon strip.
—Marina Endicott, author of Open Arms

You don't often find the word "funny" associated with the phrase "social conscience." But you will equate the two while reading Afterall. This is a stylish, sharply observational debut from a writer with a delightful sense of humour and an eye for the street.
Curtis Gillespie, author of Playing Through

Afterall is a frank, sometimes funny story about the tenuous space between homeless and homeful, voiceless and vocal, visible and invisible, and shoeless and finely shod. Using an easy, observant style, Lee Kvern reveals te naïveties and strengths of her characters as we join them in a captivating all-nighter.
Barb Howard, author of Whipstock

This book was previously announced under the titles Fluevogs and Beth and the Art of Homelessness.

About the Author

Lee Kvern's White was awarded first prize in the 2007 National CBC Literary Awards, published in Air Canada's enRoute magazine, and produced for Eleanor Wachtel's Between The Covers, CBC Radio. She is a two-time short story winner for Visibility and Fourteen, respectively for the 2006/2007 CBC Alberta Anthology. Her novella Afterall was nominated for the 2006 Alberta Book Awards. The Nothing Yard was the winner of the Heritage Short Story Contest in 1999. She was a finalist for Jojo Bear in the CBC Literary Awards in 1989. She has published short stories in literary magazines, Event and Descant. Her second novel The Matter of Sylvie is pending publication. She lives in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada and is at work on her third book, a short story collection.

 

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