Runner-up in the Prose Fiction Category at the 2016 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada!
Winner of Best Book Cover at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

In his debut story collection, Kevin A. Couture creates a world where the veneer of humanness stretches thin and often cracks as a menagerie of burdened characters reveal their beast-like traits. In his desperate survival plan, a pre-teen “rescues” dogs in order to sell them back to their well-off owners; a marathon pacesetter reflects on the pace she sets both on and off the race route, as she navigates her imperfect marriage; a man confronts his drive for alcohol and the deadly and isolating consequences that leave him to risk his last scrap of control; and two kids, for different reasons, execute their plan to capture a bear cub.,

Lost Animal Club combines murky sensibilities with finely rendered, precise prose. The writing is gripping and honest, with metaphors and similes as startling as the harsh choices the characters make.

Kevin A. Couture grew up in a small BC mining town and has spent the last decade waking before dawn to write. The stories in his debut collection, Lost Animal Club, have all appeared in various Canadian and American journals. He has an affinity for mysterious t-shirts and ill-fitting sunglasses, and has created three highly-selective mix tapes each year since 1985. In recent years, he has been nominated for the Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and was included in the anthology, Coming Attractions. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife, two daughters, and their Brittany spaniel, who spectacularly defies animal training.

Kevin Couture's profile page

• Winner, Best Book Cover at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards
• Runner-up, Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada - Prose Fiction Category

Praise for Lost Animal Club:
“Kevin A. Couture’s Lost Animal Club is a polished lens that glimpses adolescent mysteries and the lingering puzzles of addiction and sobriety and healing. These haunting stories are populated by bears and bees, cats and dogs, lost animals and lost children and lost parents, evoking a world both charming and stormy, domestic and animal—and it is animal in the best way.”
~ Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
“The stories in Lost Animal Club do what the best short fiction excels at: shaping loneliness into art and capturing people in extremis. Kevin A. Couture’s sharp, muscular prose gives off emotional jolt after emotional jolt, sparking the reader into thinking about what it means to be human.”
~ Zsuzsi Gartner, author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
“Kevin A. Couture’s stories are filled with the hurting and the brave, people who seek redemption in whatever ways they can manage. Lost Animal Club is a compelling, dexterous collection, full of humanity and insight.”
~ Julie Paul, author of The Pull of the Moon
“These are beautiful stories about survival in social wilderness. I loved them! Read this book. Lost Animal Club will find you wherever you are and invite you to come back home.”
~ Sarah Selecky, author of This Cake Is for the Party
"... executed with masterful control..."
~ Andrew MacDonald, Event
"These stories stuck with me, so consuming that they infiltrated my dreams...."
~ Worn Pages and Ink Blog