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.