Nominated for a Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Toronto Book Award and an Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
March 6, 1934. Hundreds gather outside City Hall to celebrate the Toronto Centenary. In the crowd, pickpocket Mona Kantor and her partner, Chesler, are âin the tip,â finding easy pickings among the jostling masses. Eli Morenz, city man for the Daily Star, is covering the festivities and uncovering the pickpocket racket working the scene. A surreptitious photo and some keen research lead him to an underworld dive in Kensington Market where Torontoâs pickpockets converge â and to Mona.
Moving from a tense newsroom on King Street to the frenetic grift at Union Station, The City Man is a romance that begins in an instant and careens towards peril. Aklerâs prose is as deft as a thiefâs fingers, as precise and powerful as a heavyweightâs punch. Packed with enchanting, arcane period slang and comparable in its evocation of a lost Toronto to Michael Ondaatjeâs In the Skin of a Lion, this is a novel of exceptional grace, excitement and beauty.
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