<p><b><i>THE NIGHT CIRCUS </i>MEETS <i>WATER FOR ELEPHANTS </i>IN THIS COMPULSIVELY READABLE DEBUT</b></p><p> <b> 'A skillful triumph<i>' </i>Jessie Burton, bestselling author of <i>The Miniaturist</i> - 'Irresistible' Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of <i>Room</i></b></p><p> New York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when <b>Sylvan Threadgill</b>, a young night soiler who cleans out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an abandoned newborn baby. An orphan himself, Sylvan was raised by a kindly Italian family and can't bring himself to leave the baby in the slop. He tucks her into his chest, resolving to find out where she belongs.</p><p> </p><p> <b>Odile Church</b> is the girl-on-the-wheel, a second-fiddle act in a show that has long since lost its magic. Odile and her sister <b>Belle </b>were raised in the curtained halls of their mother's spectacular Coney Island sideshow: <i>The Church of Marvels. </i>Belle was always the star-the sword swallower-light, nimble, a true human marvel. But now the sideshow has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in the ashes, and Belle has escaped to the city. </p><p> </p><p> <b>Alphie </b>wakes up groggy and confused in Blackwell's Lunatic Asylum. The last thing she remembers is a dark stain on the floor, her mother-in-law screaming. She had once walked the streets as an escort and a penny-Rembrandt, cleaning up men after their drunken brawls. Now she is married; a lady in a reputable home. She is sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband's vile mother. But then a young woman is committed alongside her, and when she coughs up a pair of scissors from the depths of her agile throat, Alphie knows she harbors a dangerous secret that will alter the course of both of their lives...</p><p> </p><p> On a single night, these strangers' lives will become irrevocably entwined, as secrets come to light and outsiders struggle for acceptance. From the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular sideshow to a desolate asylum, Leslie Parry makes turn-of-the-century New York feel alive, vivid, and magical in this luminous debut. In prose as magnetic and lucid as it is detailed, she offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past marked by astonishing feats of narrative that will leave you breathless.</p>