Silver Lake - by Alex Pugsley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Told in the classic three-act structure of a Hollywood movie, Silver Lake is the third installment in a series of novels about the character Aubrey McKee.

Alex Pugsley's latest is set in Toronto and Silver Lake, a trendy neighborhood in east central Los Angeles. It details Aubrey's journey from unemployed broken-hearted schlub to B-movie production assistant, to comedy writer and science-fiction screenwriter, and all the way up to feature film director. Along the way, he encounters long-ago Halifax friends, manic movie producers, NHL players turned talk show hosts, wilding Victoria's Secret models, impulsive movie stars ... and his own rising destiny.

A narrative-driven book, full of larger-than-life (but fully real) characters, told in vivid scenes, Silver Lake shimmers in and out of themes of comedy, romance, identity, and aspiration.

Review Quotes

Praise for the Aubrey McKee Series

"Aubrey, captivated as much by his lover's eccentricities as he is by her striking beauty, strives with equal energy to penetrate the mystery of a life that's been damaged by her abuse. But even as Aubrey believes he's come to terms with the 'emotional schizophrenia of our relations, ' when Gudrun's career takes a turn that propels her in an exciting creative direction, he finds himself ill-prepared to cope . . . A realistic portrait of a complex romance between two mismatched but sympathetic characters."--Kirkus Reviews

"A fun and fascinating read from start to finish, The Education of Aubrey McKee continues to showcase author Alex Pugsley's genuine flair for original, distinctive, and narrative driven storytelling style."--Midwest Book Review

"Alex Pugsley's The Education of Aubrey McKee is alive with raucous humour, drunken abandon, soul searching and soul-crushing crushes. Full to the gills with art making and poetry and TV scripts written on spec, posturing and the true thing. Every page is feverish and suave. Pugsley is the love child of Jack Kerouac and Greta Gerwig, or D.H. Lawrence and Wes Anderson--ticklingly funny and dead serious at the same time."--Lisa Moore, author of This Is How We Love

"This amazing book is nothing 'in turns'--instead it is everywhere continuously lyric, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The promise of Alex Pugsley's nonchalant epic, as of this second entry, is worthy of crazy comparisons--Balzac, Jonathan Coe, etc . . . Pugsley's project operates on a similar double-scale, always wittily precise, even sometimes zany in the particulars, yet with the sense that a picture of time itself has been captured, through windows in front of which his portrait-subjects merely happen to be seated."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

"The novel has an inventive structure, beginning with a short story set sometime in the future about Aubrey working as a writer on a sketch-comedy show and ending with a play by Aubrey."--Publisher's Weekly

"Evoking comparisons in both style and substance to the work of John Irving and Robertson Davies in its assemblage of perceptive, richly detailed character studies . . . The life of a Canadian city is revealed with verve and insight."--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

As a screenwriter and story editor, Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Lauren Ash, Scott Thompson, Jenn Whalen, Mark McKinney, Dan Aykroyd, and Michael Cera. He wrote and directed the feature Dirty Singles which won for him the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at TIFF. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC's Writers to Watch. His first story collection, Shimmer, was nominated for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. His most recent novel, The Education of Aubrey McKee, was long-listed for the Toronto Book Awards.