A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

The Student

By (author): Cary Fagan

The Student is a portrait of a life in two snapshots.

It’s 1957 and Miriam Moscowitz is starting her final year of university with unwavering ambition. She is a serious and passionate student of literature who studies hard, dates a young Jewish man with a good job, and is the apple of her father’s eye and the worry of her mother’s. But then, in a single moment, her dreams crumble around her. Unsure of how to break a path for herself, she begins a reckless affair with an American student obsessed with the civil rights clashes in the south. When the young man abandons her to join the movement back home, Miriam gets on a bus to follow him, no longer sure of anything in her life.

Forty-eight years later, Miriam is the about to witness her son’s wedding (a newly-legal, same-sex marriage). She climbs the stairs to her study to look at a book she had carried with her on a bus to Detroit. She reads the marginalia written in her young, minuscule handwriting. It is familiar and strange, embarrassing and exhilarating, and she wonders what the young person who had written all these words almost half a century ago had to do with the old woman who read them now.

The Student is a compassionate and compelling work of fiction that brings together two pivotal times in history. With its innovative structure, masterful prose, and intelligently crafted characters, this book illustrates how we are shaped by – and can eventually overcome – the constraints of the times we occupy.

AUTHOR

Cary Fagan

Cary Fagan is the author of six novels and four story collections for adults, as well as many award-winning books for children. His books include The Student (finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Toronto Book Prize), A Bird’s Eye (finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), and the story collection My Life Among the Apes (longlisted for the Giller Prize). Cary was born and raised in Toronto, where he lives with his family.


Reviews

“Toronto author Cary Fagan’s latest novel, The Student, seems like one of his best. It has the agreeable quality of being both simple and deep, with prose as clear as a smooth pond whose waters go to impressive depths.” ?Bill Gladstone, Canadian Jewish News

“It is the richness of his characters, his insistence on revealing their full humanity, that resonates from one generation to the next. The truth of their struggles, the pain of their suffering, their resistance to ? and activism in shaping ? the society and history pressing in around them.Fagan has created an accurate portrait of two key moments in history. Even those of us who weren’t there can feel it.” ?Kevin Keystone, Literary Review of Canada

“In The Student, Cary Fagan has not only crafted a vivid portrait of a woman in her youth and old age, but also an intriguing meditation on what changes and what remains the same over time.” ? Elyse Friedman

“Cary Fagan’s brilliant and loveable female heroine Miriam Moscovitch is so real she seems to live and breathe the same air as her readers.” ?Susan Swan

“A marvel of compression, The Student is a spirited gem of a novel. Cary Fagan captures with wisdom and intimacy the passions that sustain and shape individuals into their best selves. Exploring Toronto’s fledgling diversity of the 1950s and its blossoming in the aughts, he reveals how, even as communities change, our need for the models preserved in literature does not. I loved this book!” ?Carol Bruneau


Awards

  • Governor General’s Award for Fiction 2019, Short-listed
  • City of Toronto Book Award 2019, Short-listed
  • Excerpts & Samples ×
    There are no other resources for this book.

    Reader Reviews

    Details

    Dimensions:

    184 Pages
    8.00in * 5.25in * .46in
    220.00gr
    .47lb

    Published:

    May 04, 2019

    Publisher:

    Freehand Books

    ISBN:

    9781988298443

    Book Subjects:

    FICTION / Literary

    Featured In:

    All Books

    Language:

    eng

    No author posts found.

    Related Blog Posts

    There are no posts with this book.