Longlisted for the 2024 Toronto Book Awards • A Toronto Star Most Anticipated Spring Title • A 49th Shelf Can't Miss Title for Spring

A young writer finds his way in and out of love in late twentieth-century Toronto.

The scene is Toronto, the early 1990s, and at a house party Aubrey McKee falls in love with a bewitching stranger who talks him into stealing a piece of cake. This woman—a poet named Gudrun Peel—rapidly becomes the person for whom he would do anything at all. Together, Aubrey and Gudrun make a life of delirious idiosyncrasy. Surrounded by friends, frenemies, lovers, and rivals in the underground arts scene, the possibilities of their destiny remain radically open. But as their relationship deepens, and their creative and professional lives stumble, stall, and then suddenly blow up, Aubrey and Gudrun struggle against their own inexperience . . . as well as each other.

The much-anticipated follow-up to Alex Pugsley’s Aubrey McKee, The Education of Aubrey McKee is a campus novel in which the city of Toronto is the institute of higher education and the setting for a glittering story about the incandescence of first love.

Alex Pugsley's profile page

• Long-listed, Toronto Book Awards

Alex Pugsley is the author of the novels Aubrey McKee and The Education of Aubrey McKee, as well as the short story collection Shimmer. Following the publication of Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. He has been nominated for Canadian Comedy Awards, Gemini Awards, Hot Doc Awards, National Magazine Awards, and is a winner of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. His feature film Dirty Singles is available on Apple TV and Prime Video. His next novel, Silver Lake, the third book in a series about Aubrey McKee, is forthcoming from Biblioasis.

Praise for The Education of Aubrey McKee

"Pugsley’s writing is a force to be reckoned with . . . Readers willing to confront the deep-seated moments that build character may extract something sublime from Pugsley’s work of intense self-discovery."
—Liam Rockall, Literary Review of Canada

"In this coming-of-age novel, poetry and chemistry collide."
—Jeff Douglas, CBC Mainstreet

"Aubrey, captivated as much by his lover’s eccentricities as he is by her striking beauty, strives with equal energy to penetrate the mystery of a life that’s been damaged by her abuse. But even as Aubrey believes he’s come to terms with the 'emotional schizophrenia of our relations,' when Gudrun’s career takes a turn that propels her in an exciting creative direction, he finds himself ill-prepared to cope . . . A realistic portrait of a complex romance between two mismatched but sympathetic characters."
—Kirkus Reviews

"There is an intoxicating quality to Pugsley’s prose . . . The Education of Aubrey McKee [has] an emotional immediacy rarely found in a novel. Hopefully, readers will see more of Aubrey McKee in the future."
—Timothy Niederman, Ottawa Review of Books

"This book captures the youthful impatient desire for excitement and experience and also the disillusionment that encroaches on this desire over time."
—Lori Feathers, Across the Pond Podcast

"A fun and fascinating read from start to finish, The Education of Aubrey McKee continues to showcase author Alex Pugsley's genuine flair for original, distinctive, and narrative driven storytelling style."
—Midwest Book Review

“It’s quite a thrill ride.”
—Deborah Bowers, Winnipeg Free Press

"I adored this book."
—Heidi Greco, The Miramichi Reader

"The best book of 2024 period."
—Jason Jeffries, Bookin' Podcast

"Pugsley has done a particularly good job of character development in this fine, extremely well-written novel that will hold readers’ attention until the end."
—Michael Cart, Booklist

"Alex Pugsley’s The Education of Aubrey McKee is alive with raucous humour, drunken abandon, soul searching and soul-crushing crushes. Full to the gills with art making and poetry and TV scripts written on spec, posturing and the true thing. Every page is feverish and suave. Pugsley is the love child of Jack Kerouac and Greta Gerwig, or D.H. Lawrence and Wes Anderson—ticklingly funny and dead serious at the same time."
—Lisa Moore, author of This Is How We Love

"This amazing book is nothing 'in turns'—instead it is everywhere continuously lyric, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The promise of Alex Pugsley's nonchalant epic, as of this second entry, is worthy of crazy comparisons—Balzac, Jonathan Coe, etc . . . Pugsley's project operates on a similar double-scale, always wittily precise, even sometimes zany in the particulars, yet with the sense that a picture of time itself has been captured, through windows in front of which his portrait-subjects merely happen to be seated."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"The novel has an inventive structure, beginning with a short story set sometime in the future about Aubrey working as a writer on a sketch-comedy show and ending with a play by Aubrey."
—Publisher's Weekly

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