"Very well written ... authentic ... very rich." --
The Arts Tonight (CBC Stereo) "No longer than many a short
story but with full novelistic range, the artfully compressed
Doctor's House is a striking recasting of form, pleasingly
packaged. It's a promising debut from a new Toronto publishing house."
-- Ted Mumford, Now Magazine "Nobody who knows Fagan's
writing will be surprised at the compelling narrative pace of his
'miniature' or at the poetry of his language and imagery. There is
nothing superfluous here, nothing flashy or self-conscious -- only the
writing of someone to whom the act of writing seems as natural as the
act of breathing." -- Roger Burford Mason, Quill & Quire
"The Doctor's House by award-winning Toronto writer Cary Fagan
is a slim novel containing a powerful story. One night in pre-war
Poland, a Rabbi and his family are murdered, along with their gentile
housekeeper. Fagan follows the housekeeper's surviving son, Josef, who
then lives with a Jewish doctor and his family in Warsaw in the late
1930's." -- Judy Saul, The Jewish Tribune "The Doctor's
House is a trim, elliptical work. [...] The story [...] is pared
down to key incidents and it has a cool, grim power. [...] The
Doctor's House ends with a strange, fantastic event, a release from
the grotesque, sudden start of the war. This soaring ending is
breathtaking, a flight from both the circumstance of the story and the
restrained style in which it is told. Precise, painful and painstaking,
The Doctor's House deserves a better description than 'a
miniature novel' -- it radiates from its small canvas." -- John Doyle,
The Globe and Mail
Cary Fagan is the author of four novels and two collections of stories. He has won the Toronto Book Award, the Jewish Committee Prize for fiction, and has received many honours for his children s books. His fiction has been published in Canada, the United States, and Germany, and his short stories have appeared in Best Canadian Stories, Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories, and elsewhere. His book reviews appear in the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Star, and The Globe & Mail. His most recent novel is Valentine's Fall. He is preparing a new story collection. Cary Fagan lives in Toronto.
ISBN 0-9680457-0-7 / 76 pp / $10 plus $2 S/H
In the late 1930s, a young boy named Josef is
given shelter in the house of a Jewish doctor in Warsaw. Entranced by
the doctor's teenaged daughter, Josef lives a charmed existence there --
until the arrival of a cousin from America disrupts all their
lives.
