When young Thomas Faye runs into a Chicago junk shop on a cold October day in 1962, he has no idea that his life is about to change forever. In the shop he meets two elderly men who are a great deal more than they seem. Arthur Farrell, the genial Irish proprietor, can seemingly heal with a touch of his hand. And perhaps, the boy learns, Farrell can do much more. Meyer, his associate, is hostile, violent, an aging streetfighter, apparently indestructible. Farrell is a survivor of the First World War, wounded at the battle of the Somme; Meyer fought at the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto. A homeless man tells Thomas that he knew Meyer in the first days of World War II, and that Meyer has never aged.
These two men remain in Thomas's life for years, through the loss of his family and his years as a wanderer. Gradually Thomas comes to recognize that his relationship with the two men has changed him as well, in ways he could never have imagined, including the way he understands human suffering, and in his ability to love.
The Conjurer's Boy is a tale of magic, of love, of the violent upheavals of the twentieth century, and of mankind's search for God places large and small.
