Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book.

With all the wonder of a small-scale The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay comes this moving and unforgettable novel about childhood, love, and magic.

Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s, young Benjamin Kleeman falls in love, first with Corrine Foster and then with magic. Hiding his new passions from his parents — the long-suffering Bella, an Italian immigrant, and Jacob, a talented but failed inventor of elaborate mechanical devices — Benjamin begins apprenticeships in magic and life itself, learning along the way that everything is more complicated than it seems.

With wit, tenderness, humour, and, startling beauty, Cary Fagan brings a gifted young man's rise to a peculiar kind of stardom, wonderfully alive.