"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 has won the City of Toronto Book Award (he has been nominated three times) and the Jewish Book Committee Prize for Fiction. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their two children.
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.
Cary Fagan is the author of two short-story collections, History Lessons (Hounslow Press) and The Little Black Dress (The Mercury Press). His first novel, The Animals' Waltz, was published by Lester Publishing in 1994. The American edition, released by St. Martin's Press, received excellent reviews in the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. It is currently being optioned for film rights. A second novel, Sleeping Weather was published by Porcupine's Quill in the spring of 1997 and a third, Felix Roth, was published by Stoddart in March of 1999. His most recent novel, The Mermaid of Paris, was published by Key Porter in October of 2003. He has also published several children's books.
