Brief Life (Paperback)

"Amid these magical realist happenings and horror motifs, Brief Life is a small-town coming-of-age story that explores family and community secrets, social status, and how teenage girls discover the world through trial and error, as well as books. Whittle is filled with puzzling people and events; it contains mysterious multitudes that are worth trying to decipher." - Literary Review of Canada

Returning to some of the characters first introduced in his award-winning novel The Green-Eyed Queen of Suicide City to tell a unique and all-new tale, Kevin Marc Fournier's Brief Life is the story of a fraught but lifelong friendship; the chronicle of a small town with a bizarre and tangled history; a multi-generational family saga of ghosts, dreams, visions, and visitations, of strange dogs, secret magic, and mysterious disappearances; a maze of funhouse mirrors, grotesque, poignant, and fantastical.

Kevin Marc Fournier is a native to the West End neighborhood of Winnipeg. He has written two novels for young adults: Sandbag Shuffle, in which two cheerful scam artists make the most of Winnipeg's great flood of 1997, and The Green-Eyed Queen of Suicide City, which invites readers into a twisted alternate reality. Both books won the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award. Fournier was shortlisted for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. He has just completed an artist residency at the Deep Bay Cabin in Riding Mountain National Park, where he was writing his next novel.