Forging an intense friendship in their senior year at Harvard, Ed, a Jewish scholarship student, and Hugh, a Boston Brahmin, abruptly and mysteriously go their separate ways years later and pursue very different lives that are shaped by their past bond.

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...