Description
A young writer finds his way in and out of love in the late twentieth century.
The scene is Toronto, early 1990s, and Aubrey McKee has fallen in love with a bewitching stranger, a poet who talks him into stealing her a piece of cake from a party and quickly becomes the person for whom he would do anything at all. As their relationship deepens and their creative and professional lives stumble, stall, then suddenly ignite, Aubrey and Gudrun struggle against their own limitations—as well as each other’s. Prefaced by a short story and concluded with a play, The Education of Aubrey McKee is the much-anticipated continuation of Alex Pugsley’s debut Aubrey McKee, a campus novel in which the city of Toronto itself is the institute of higher education, and a glittering story about learning how to love.
Praise for Aubrey McKee
“Aubrey McKee is no austere, white-walled art gallery of a novel. It’s abundant, highly decorated, and unafraid of extravagance, of stylistic excess … From ordinary incidents—a childhood acquaintance, marital strife, a wedding—as well as a few extraordinary ones, Aubrey McKee builds a dazzling and complicated world, a childhood in Halifax as a vibrant universe in itself.”
—Toronto Star
“Evoking comparisons in both style and substance to the work of John Irving and Robertson Davies in its assemblage of perceptive, richly detailed character studies … The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight.”
—Kirkus
“A wonderful book, it absolutely floored me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read anything like it … I found Aubrey McKee to be more reminiscent of Dubliners by James Joyce, not only because the sense of place is so strong, but because the narrative in this book is told through interconnected stories.”
—Jason Jefferies, Bookin’
“The mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic Halifax depicted in Aubrey McKee is as enchanted as it is benighted, an adolescent fever-dream. This is a rollicking, strange and unforgettable coming of age novel unlike anything you’ve ever read.”
—Lynn Coady, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of Hellgoing
