Roll up, roll up! Read this way! This month, your library card gets you a front-row seat in the big top.
On this list we've rounded up 11 great novels that explore the dazzling and dangerous world of circuses, carnivals, and magic.
From a runaway who joins the circus and falls in love with its star performer, to the murder of a clown at the village fair.
Mystery and wonder await you – click the titles and prepare to be amazed!
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1. Circus of Wonders – Elizabeth Macneal
1866. In a coastal village in southern England, Nell picks violets for a living. Set apart by her community because of the birthmarks that speckle her skin, Nell's world is her beloved brother and devotion to the sea.
But when Jasper Jupiter's Circus of Wonders arrives in the village, Nell is kidnapped. Her father has sold her, promising Jasper Jupiter his very own leopard girl. It is the greatest betrayal of Nell's life, but as her fame grows, and she finds friendship with the other performers and Jasper's gentle brother Toby, she begins to wonder if joining the show is the best thing that has ever happened to her.
In London, newspapers describe Nell as the eighth wonder of the world. Figurines are cast in her image, and crowds rush to watch her soar through the air. But who gets to tell Nell's story? What happens when her fame threatens to eclipse that of the showman who bought her?
2. The First Bright Thing – J.R.Dawson
After the First World War, a select few wake up with frightening magical abilities. Rin can jump through time. Her wife, Odette, can heal the unhealable. And their friend, Mauve, sees what others can’t. Alone, afraid and exiled from regular society, the trio create a haven for Sparks – people like them – a circus housing those who are powerful and lost.
Now it’s 1926 and Rin runs the Circus of the Fantasticals. It travels across the States, spreading enchantment and joy to those who need it. Rin hopes their performances leave the world brighter than before. But new threats loom that even circus lights can’t vanquish. Another devastating war is barrelling across the world. Worse still, Rin’s past creeps closer every day, a malevolent shadow she can’t fully escape. This takes the form of a rival circus, with tents as black as midnight. Its leader has dark powers and even darker desires as the Sparks have something he wants – and Rin knows he won’t stop until he has it.
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
It's the week before Hallowe'en, and Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois. The siren song of the calliope entices all with promises of youth regained and dreams fulfilled...
And as two boys trembling on the brink of manhood set out to explore the mysteries of the dark carnival's smoke, mazes and mirrors, they will also discover the true price of innermost wishes...
4. Caraval – Stephanie Garber
Welcome to Caraval, where nothing is quite what it seems.
Scarlett has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining from afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year, week-long performance where the audience participates in the show. Caraval is magic, mystery adventure and for Scarlett and her beloved sister Tella it represents freedom and an escape from their ruthless, abusive father. When Scarlett discovers her father has arranged a marriage for her, she believes all her hopes of escape have been dashed.
Then the sisters' long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive and it seems their dreams have come true. Yet, no sooner have they entered the confines of Caraval than Tella vanishes, kidnapped by the show's mastermind organiser, Legend.
Scarlett has been told that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. But nonetheless she quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. Real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever.
5. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads: Opens at Nightfall, Closes at Dawn.
As the sun disappears beyond the horizon, all over the tents small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sky, the sign appears. Le Cirque des Reves. The Circus of Dreams. Now the circus is open. Now you may enter.
6. The Magicians (ebook) – Lev Grossman
In a secret world of forbidden knowledge, power comes at a terrible price ...
Quentin Coldwater's life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead - but a strange envelope bearing Quentin's name leads him down a very different path to any he'd ever imagined.
The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it's a world that seems to answer all Quentin's desires. But the idyll cannot last - and when it's finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected ...
7. Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse – Simon Brett
Meet Major Bricket, an infrequent resident of Highfield House in Stunston Peveril, Suffolk. In the past the Major's work assignments have prevented him from spending much time there and a result, there is an air of mystery around him. But now the Major has retired and has come home for good in his open-topped little red sports car - and what a homecoming it is, for lying spreadeagled on his lawn in the summer sunshine is the corpse of a clown.
Coincidence that the circus has come to Stunston Peveril for the annual four-day village fair? Yet none of their quota of clowns is missing - or at least, nobody is saying. Or is the body that of an unfortunate early guest at the village's highlight of the social calendar, the Fincham Abbey Costume Ball? Fortunately, Major Bricket's past clandestine career means that he is now very well placed to solve the mystery of the dead clown on his camomile lawn.
8. Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and utterly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits in the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth: a second-rate travelling circus struggling to survive by making one-night stands in town after endless town.
Jacob, a veterinary student now unable to finish his degree, is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. He meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
9. The Zig Zag Girl – Elly Griffiths
Brighton, 1950. When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, DI Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick called the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men.
Max is still on the circuit, touring seaside towns in the company of ventriloquists, sword-swallowers and dancing girls. Changing times mean that variety is not what it once was, yet Max is reluctant to leave this world to help Edgar investigate.
But when the dead girl turns out to be known to him, he changes his mind. Another death, another magic trick: Edgar and Max become convinced that the answer to the murders lies in their army days.
10. The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin
It's 1969 and holed up in a grimy tenement building in New York's Lower East Side is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. Four siblings, too young for what they are about to hear, sneak out to hear their fortunes.
We then follow the intertwined paths the siblings take over the course of five decades and how they choose to live with the supposed knowledge the fortune-teller gave them that day. This is a story about life, mortality and the choices we make: is it better to live a long and cautious life, or to burn brightly, but for the shortest time?
11. Joyland – Stephen King
Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.
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