The Student
Cary Fagan
Imprint: Freehand Books / Format: Paper / publication date: May 2019 / 184 pages / ISBN: 978-1988298443 / Price: $21.95
Finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Toronto Book Award
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 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 the bus to Detroit. The marginalia written in her young, minuscule handwriting is familiar and strange, embarrassing and exhilarating, and she wonders what the young person who wrote all these words almost half a century ago has to do with the old woman who reads 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.
“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.” — Canadian Jewish News
“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