Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...
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Description
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices plastered on lampposts. It is simply there. Within these nocturnal black-and-white-striped tents awaits an utterly unique experience, a feast for the senses. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, however, a fierce competition is under way, a contest between two young illusionists.
Author
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Description
"When all is lost, how do you find the courage to keep moving forward? 1938. Lena Papadopoulos has never quite found her place within the circus, even as the daughter of the extraordinary headlining illusionist, Theo. Brilliant and curious, Lena--who uses a wheelchair after a childhood bout with polio--yearns for the real-world magic of science and medicine, her mind stronger than the limitations placed on her by society. Then her unconventional life...
Author
Pub. Date
c2003
Description
For the boy, it was the first real chance for a future. For the man, it was one last chance to triumph over his past. Opportunities like these happen only once in a Blue Moon.
"An absolute charmer."—Library Journal Starred Review
"Simply put, this is a ripsnorting good historical yarn full of circus lore, so smartly told by an expert storyteller that it's the kind of book truly deserving that overused term 'page-turner.'"—Chicago
...7) Tightrope
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"An unconventional woman and a man shrouded in mystery walk a tightrope of desire as they race against a killer to find a machine that could change the world"-- Provided by publisher.
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A vivid, daring novel about the devastating power of family secrets--beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s.
On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom. Lilly isn't allowed to explore the meadows around Blackwood Manor. She's never even ventured beyond her narrow room. Momma insists it's for Lilly's...
10) Meridon
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Series
Description
Meridon, a vagabond gypsy, allows her vague memories of a very different life, as well as the necklace that is her birthright, to lead her home to Wideacre where she takes her place as its mistress.
11) Geek love
Author
Description
A wild, often horrifying, novel about freaks, geeks and other aberrancies of the human condition who travel together (a whole family of them) as a circus. It's a solipsistic funhouse world that makes "normal" people seem bland and pitiful. Arturo the Aqua-Boy, who has flippers and an enormous need to be loved. A museum of sacred monsters that didn't make it. An endearing "little beetle" of a heroine. Sort of like Tod Browning's Freaks crossed with...
12) Nightmare alley
Author
Pub. Date
[2010]
Description
"Nightmare Alley "begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek--alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision--going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak...
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Description
"Riding shotgun, Red Ryan leads a doomed stagecoach of the damned on the longest, deadliest journey of his life... 5 PASSENGERS. 400 MILES. 1,000 WAYS TO DIE. According to local legend, the stagecoach known as the Gray Ghost is either haunted, cursed, or just plain unlucky. Each of its last three drivers and three more riding shotgun came to a violent, bloody end. And now it's Red Ryan's turn to guard five foolhardy passengers on the stage's next-and...
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Description
She was only two feet, eight inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P.T. Barnum and married tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century. A fictionalized account of the Gilded Age and a woman's public triumphs and personal tragedies, this is the...
15) Embrace me
Author
Pub. Date
[2007]
Description
When a "lizard woman," a self-mutilating preacher, a tattooed monk, and a sleazy lobbyist find themselves in the same North Carolina town one winter, their lives are edging precariously close to disaster and improbably close to grace.
Author
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
When seventeen-year-old Gracie Hart gets caught stealing a ride on a circus train, she expects to be arrested. Instead, she is offered a job as the assistant to the circus magician and knife-thrower, Jack. He's charismatic and genteel but his aim isn't perfect--hence the position opening. Once Gracie starts performing with Jack, she begins finding threatening notes hidden in her costume. At first she thinks she's being haunted by the ghost of the...
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Description
"In 1911, Mabel MacGinnis is Europe's strongest woman and has performed beside her father in the Manzo Brothers Circus her entire life. But at his unexpected death, she loses everything she's ever known and sets off in the company of acrobat Jake Cunningham for America in hope of finding the mother she's just discovered is still alive. Isabella Moreau, the nation's most feted aerialist, has given everything to the circus. But age and injury now threaten...
19) Arcadio: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
c1983
Description
Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walk of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately...
20) Little nothing
Author
Pub. Date
[2016]
Description
"The story of a girl, scorned for her physical deformity, whose passion and salvation lie in her otherworldly ability to transform herself and the world around her"--Amazon.com.
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