Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.

With all the wonder of a small-scale The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay comes this moving and unforgettable novel about childhood, love, and magic.

Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s, young Benjamin Kleeman falls in love, first with Corrine Foster and then with magic. Hiding his new passions from his parents — the long-suffering Bella, an Italian immigrant, and Jacob, a talented but failed inventor of elaborate mechanical devices — Benjamin begins apprenticeships in magic and life itself, learning along the way that everything is more complicated than it seems.

With wit, tenderness, humour, and, startling beauty, Cary Fagan brings a gifted young man’s rise to a peculiar kind of stardom, wonderfully alive.

Cary Fagan is the author of eight previous novels and five books of short stories, including The Student, Great Adventures for the Faint of Heart, and A Bird's Eye. He has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers' Trust Fiction Award, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and has won the Toronto Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. He is also an acclaimed writer of books for children, having won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the IODE Jean Throop Book Award, a Mr. Christie Silver Medal, the Joan Betty Stuchner—Oy Vey!—Funniest Children's Book Award, and the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People. Fagan's work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Korean and Persian. He still lives in his hometown of Toronto.

Cary Fagan's profile page

• Short-listed, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
• Commended, Amazon.ca Best Books: Editors' Picks

In A Bird's Eye, Fagan's complementary talents for literary intent and straightforward reader appeal are deftly combined.

Edmonton Journal

Cary Fagan is the first author to portray so masterfully that inherent in [Kensington Market]... is pure and utter magic.

National Post

This minimalist novel from the iconic Cary Fagan demonstrates the author's talent for making every word count. Like a poet, he curates white space, the silences between words, every fleck of punctuation.

The Coast

...small, yet incrediby rich...

Welland Tribune

Fagan captures the long days and delight of youth...A Bird’s Eye consumed me like a memory, warm and sweet and sad. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was magic.

Globe and Mail

Fagan's book is a tiny gem, entertaining, funny and scrumptiously written.

Toronto Star

A slim volume of great beauty, memorable and filled with truth. Cary Fagan has managed to make Toronto seem magical.

Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

...A Bird’s Eye, with its trim and finely balanced prose, diverse mix of ethnic characters, fine sense of place and storyline that glides along as smoothly as a bird in flight, ranks as perhaps [Fagan's] finest book yet.

The Canadian Jewish News

Fagan's writing style, coupled with his familiar yet refreshing characters, makes the novel one where the pages get turned faster and faster as the reader gets more interested in what happens next.

Winnipeg Free Press

1930s Toronto

by bookwormJH

A charming novel about a young Jewish boy in late-1930s Toronto and his discovery of magic and illusion. I love that so much of Toronto is present in this short novel: Kensington Market, Gladstone Library, Yonge St., Pape Ave., Toronto Islands, etc. Interesting to see the immigrant communities in Toronto well aware of what is happening back in Europe at the time.