The Education of Aubrey McKee

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

The scene is Toronto, 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.

As a screenwriter and story editor, Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Dan Aykroyd and Michael Cera. Recently, he wrote and directed the feature film Dirty Singles which won the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at Toronto International Film Festival. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s 2020 Writers to Watch. He lives in Toronto.