High school reunions can be hell. But when you throw in racial and sexual tensions, extramarital affairs and cannibalistic, undead vegetarians, it’s hell times infinity. Brash, clever and monstrously funny, Venous Hum charts the lives of Lai Fun Kugelheim and Stefanja Dumanowski, best friends who, upon hearing the news of an old high school acquaintance’s death, are gripped by an insatiable nostalgia and organize a 20-year reunion. What initially seemed like a simple task becomes increasingly complicated for Lai Fun, but the past is nothing compared to her messy present: Her marriage to a successful businesswoman is crumbling, she’s having an affair with a man (who happens to be Stefanja’s husband) and her oddly supernatural mother—an immigrant vegetarian with an unusual appetite—only wants her daughter to be happy. But in the wake of such chaos, the only constant is the hum of the blood coursing through her veins. A satire on race, gender, sexual preference and vegetarianism, this is a magic-realist novel that will throw your assumptions of the world and the people who inhabit it out the window. It’s the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence that announces the end of literary fiction as we know it and the beginning of something entirely new.
Author
Suzette Mayr is the author of five novels including her most recent, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. Her fourth novel, Monoceros, won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, was long-listed for the 2011 Giller Prize, nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and included on The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2011. Her first novel, Moon Honey, was shortlisted for the Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book and Best Novel prizes. The Widows, her second novel, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canadian-Caribbean region. Mayr is past president of the Writers' Guild of Alberta and teaches creative writing in the English Department at the University of Calgary where she was the 2002-2003 Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence.
