A man wakes up in a hospital with one word in his head: Sapporo. He dimly recalls this as the place where he was raised, and it becomes his name and identity. Like an immigrant without language or memory he relies on his young son as guide and interpreter, but soon drifts away into what some might see as madness.

In Sapporo's floating world, he is also Prospero, summoning the ancestors and channeling the lost dreams that gave way to the modern industrial era.
His son, meanwhile, has escaped to the city's underworld. His laconic account of the anarchic, callous, tender tribe of street kids is beyond the scope of any realist fiction, yet compelling as a documentary and fiercely poetic.

Parallel to these worlds, and destined to reconnect them, is a young woman's journey through what is indeed the Third World - as surreal in its poverty and shifting realities as anything in Sapporo's visions or his son's predations.
The Beautiful Children is a triumph of language and structure; it is also a haunting, and haunted, elegy upon innocence.

Michael Kenyon was born in Sale, England, and has lived on the West Coast since 1967. He’s the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction. The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award for best novel. Other work has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Baxter Hathaway Prize (Cornell) in fiction, The Malahat Review Novella Prize, Prism international’s fiction contest (won twice), the Journey Prize, and the National and Western Magazine Awards. He has adjudicated for the Banff Centre writing program, for the BC Arts Council, and for the Saskatchewan Arts Board. He has been employed as a seaman, a diver, and a taxi driver. Presently he works as a freelance editor and a therapist, and divides his week between Pender Island and Vancouver.

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"Not only does Kenyon forge imaginative narrative paths, but also he has a compelling gift for language on a sentence level . . . Anyone who respects attempts to make fiction will be rewarded by reading Kenyon's work." - Candace Fertile, Malahat Review