Beaver Hills Forever

(Paperback)

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An irreverent and playful novella of Metis voices that reflects the complexities of contemporary prairie life.

Conor Kerr's 2024 novel Prairie Edge was a finalist for both the Giller Prize and the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize. His latest book, Beaver Hills Forever, takes a riotous, uncompromising look at the intertwined lives of four characters, each an abstract expression of the few paths available to Metis people on the Prairies. In alternating poetic verses, Buddy, Baby Momma, Fancy University Boy, and Aunty Prof share their inner dreams, hardships, delusions of grandeur, and existential plights. While the messy day-to-day is created by their own doing, the lives of these four individuals are doubly compromised by Canada's colonial education system and resource extraction industries.

A beguiling and genre-bending work, Beaver Hills Forever offers a moving, necessary exploration of education, labour, and the dynamic, ever-changing bonds that bring us back to each other. Here is a diverse, funny, pitch-perfect chorus of voices that rings loud and true over the wide prairie landscape.

Reviews

"'Not every Mtis kid / Needs a sad story, ' says a character in Conor Kerr's propulsive and deeply entertaining new work, where each bone-clean sentence holds a galaxy of stories in its marrow. Kerr is part of a vital contemporary movement that is reimagining what our literatures can be and what they can do. Beaver Hills Forever is a reminder that laughter and passion are as much a part of the narrative as struggle. In these pages, you'll find voices that demand to be heard, felt, and remembered."
--Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman and Bad Endings

"Much like his prose, Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever imbues the language of everyday Indigenous life with a poetic charm that is just incredibly readable and relatable. This book is truly multitudinous: a love story, an anti-love story, a critique of neoliberalism, an ode to the Prairies, and, above all, proof that even our smallest desires are worthy of sustained poetic consideration."
--Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of Coexistence

"Beaver Hills Forever is full of raunch and riot. Conor Kerr's ability to gravitate around the embodied truths of institutional whiteness, class, settler colonization, and the Indigenous (Mtis) experience in the moraine of amiskwaciy is rebellious in its desire to not pathologize or rationalize the violent backdrops of its animate setting. With his skilled hand, Kerr makes sure there is 'room for [all] in the digital economy of the Future.'"
--Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

"Aho, fancy reader! Welcome to Conor Kerr's Beaver Hills Forever. We'll laugh, we'll cry. We'll smoke, we'll die. Etc, etc. Beaver Hills Forever is funny, heartfelt, poetic, badass. It's Bald Boy, Goodbye, Sad Story, Indigenous Canon. Etc, etc. Magpie cackles, Mtis literatures, Aunty Prof wonders, realizes, smudges, feel-good energy. Fuck all the ongoing bullshit internal politics and academic distortion and just hear the truth, etc, etc."
--Jordan Abel, author of Empty Spaces and NISHGA

Author Bio

Conor Kerr (he/him) is a national awardwinning (and losing) Metis/Ukrainian writer and bird hunter living in amiskwacwskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta). His previous books are the ReLit Award-winning novel Avenue of Champions (Nightwood Editions) and the Giller Prize-nominated novel Prairie Edge (Strange Light), as well as the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers (Bookland Press) and the Governor General-shortlisted Old Gods (Nightwood Editions).