Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780996717540  (Print)
9780996717557 (eBook)
$14.99 (Print); $9.99 (eBook)
Paperback, eBook

About the Author

MARK JORDAN MANNER has published stories in The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, and others. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The University of Guelph and a BA from York University. He lives in Toronto. 

Most Perfect Things About People

Mark Jordan Manner

​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.   
Advance Acclaim for Most Perfect Things About People

"Mark Jordan Manner can write like a motherfucker. I met him years ago, at a literary festival, and he showed me a short story he had written. I read it and told him he had a big future ahead of him. Most Perfect Things About People shows the big future is here. It's a badass book. He's a badass writer."
- James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces

"Mark Jordan Manner's debut novel narrates the dissolution of an extended family after a tragedy, but through a kaleidoscopic prism: its views are from surprising angles, from points far apart in history, from siblings and from total strangers, now very near, now far. It refracts rather than reflects. The resulting collage portrays not just the anguish and growth of one tribe, but of the surrounding small town, with its grinding jobs and its basement apartments--indeed of a social class. Technically it is precise and ambitious, its voices distinct, funny, frightening and sorrowful. It glitters."
- Russell Smith, author of Confidence and Girl Crazy

"In Most Perfect Things About People, Mark Jordan Manner shatters the Beally family, scattering their shards across his stories, covered in grit and still sharp along the edges. As his words pull the pieces back together, each fault-line reveals something bright, new and necessary."
- Andrew F. Sullivan, author of WASTE and All We Want is Everything