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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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