Elizabeth and After

Winner of the Governor General Award for Fiction, Elizabeth and After is a final parting gift from the talented Matt Cohen, delivering this haunting tale of love, loss, family and grief.

     Ever since the death of his mother, Elizabeth McKelvey, Carl McKelvey has been away from his small-town home of West Gull for three years. When his father, William, steals a car and lands in the middle of Dead Swede Lake, Carl comes back home to pick up the pieces. But Carl's homecoming is anything but joyful, as he confronts the past he tried to run from: the guilt he holds over his role in his mother's death, his fractured relationship with his ex-wife Chrissy, and his daughter Lizzie, whom he hopes to reconcile and reconnect with. At the center of it all is Elizabeth, a woman whose death reveals secrets of her own.

Shortly before his death in December 1999, MATT COHEN won the Governor General's Award for Elizabeth and After (his final novel) and the Harbourfront Festival Prize in honour of his life as a writer. In 1998 he received the Toronto Arts Award for writing. He is the author of thirteen novels as well as poetry, short stories, books for children and works of translation from French into English.