by Hannah Rodgers Barnaby

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step inside Mosco's Traveling Wonder Show, a menagerie of human curiosities and misfits guaranteed to astound and amaze! But perhaps the strangest act of Mosco's display is Portia Remini, a normal among the freaks, on the run from McGreavy's Home for Wayward Girls.

 
by Melanie Benjamin

Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump, the diminutive wife of Gen. Tom Thumb, narrates her life story in this vivacious fictionalized autobiography that takes her from a small New England town to a seedy Mississippi showboat and eventually into the entourage of the impresario P.T. Barnum.

 

by Matthew Carnahan

 When he wakes up naked by the side of the highway in the middle of the desert, twenty-two-year-old Bailey Quinn is only sure of a few things: He’s in a world of pain. He’s tripping out of his head. And someone seems to have made an attempt at slashing his throat.  Just another day in the circus.

by Tracy Chevalier

The Kellaways are country mice come to work for Astley's Circus in 1790s London, where they meet city mouse William Blake -- and no one is ever the same. 

 

by Susan Crandall

Set in the rapidly changing world of 1920s America, this is a story of three people from very different backgrounds and set adrift by life-altering circumstances. As they crisscross the heartland, exploring the rapidly expanding role of aviation from barnstorming to bootlegging, from a flying circus to the dangerous sport of air racing, the three companions form a makeshift family.

by Cathy Day

The Great Porter Circus winters in an Indiana town called Lima, where an elephant can change the course of a man's life -- or the manner of his death. Jennie Dixianna entices men with her dazzling Spin of Death and keeps them in line with secrets locked in a cedar box. The lonely wife of the show's manager has each room of her house painted like a sideshow banner.

by Frank Delaney

Ben and his father watch a vagabond variety revue making a stop in the Irish countryside. After a two-hour kaleidoscope of low comedy, Shakespearean recitations, juggling, tumbling, and other entertainments, Ben’s father makes a fateful decision: to abandon his family and set off on the road with Miss Venetia Kelly and her caravan.

 

by Glen David Gold

President Harding is decapitated in one of Carter's performances, then eaten by a lion. The president, of course, reappears onstage moments later, smiling and unscathed, but when he suddenly and mysteriously dies just hours later, the entire country wonders just what Carter did to him during the show. 

 

by Peter Høeg

 In contemporary Denmark, a circus clown who's frantically in debt agrees to serve as guardian for a group of children with mystical gifts. Then he discovers the children's real purpose.

by Robert Hough
 

After fleeing a Kentucky mental institution where she had been committed for failure to fulfill her marital obligations, young Mary Aganosticus hid from authorities by joining the circus. There, as Mabel Stark, she discovered a unique affinity with tigers, whom she preferred to three subsequent husbands.

 

by Richard Schmitt
 

Gary, a hapless high school dropout and runaway, gets a job, almost by accident, as a laborer with a traveling circus. He is quickly seduced by the security of repeated ritual and the closed system that is circus life.

by Erika Swyler

A young librarian lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival.

 

by Carolyn Turgeon

Tessa is a very small girl in a family of giants. And, much to her family's bewilderment and ridicule, she isn't cut out for farmwork. Instead, Tessa gets a job at the local library, where the enigmatic librarian, Mary, with her stories of the circus and potions for the lovelorn, takes Tessa under her wing and teaches her the art of trapeze flying.