Praise for The Education of Aubrey McKee
"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
"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
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
