Michael Kenyon's The Beautiful Children is a novel of style and power. At the novel's core is a story of reclamation. A man wakes up in a hospital with one word in his head 'Sapporo' He remembers this as the place he was raised and it becomes his only identity. As he struggles to recollect his life, and wife, and to create a connection with his young son, he falters and flees. Left without a guardian, the boy claims drug-addicted neighbours as his caregivers. It is here that both father and son begin their separate journeys.

Other stories emerge from Kenyon's often-surreal vision. Victims and monsters range across landscapes from Vancouver to Japan, from Africa to the Gulf Islands. But at its heart, The Beautiful Children remains an investigation of human relationships that fail expectation. Societies, like tectonic plates, reshape and redefine definitions of family. And, in the vicious cycles of abandonment and violence, hope is established within the fragmented psyches of these characters, and their stories, more than the lives they have lived, ferry the past toward the future. The only certainty is that memory isn't carried in the blood, and love can be brutal.