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  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405957748
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Circus of Mirrors




A dazzling new novel set in twentieth century Berlin, perfect for fans of Cabaret and The Whalebone Theatre

BERLIN, 1926: After the death of their parents, sisters Leni and Annette only have each other. Dreaming of better days, but desperate, Leni finds work at a notorious cabaret: the Babylon Circus.

From the dancer’s barely-there costumes, to the glimmering mirrors that cover the walls, the Babylon Circus is a place where reality and fantasy merge. For Leni, it’s an overwhelming new world, and she’s happiest hiding in the shadows.

Until she meets the cabaret’s resident pianist, Paul.

And so begins a love affair that will shape the lives of Leni and Annette, as they navigate the next forty years in the dark and dazzling city they call home. . .

  • Published: 12 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781405957748
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

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Praise for Circus of Mirrors

Praise for Julie Owen Moylan

:

Touching, entertaining, hopeful. A vivid sense of time, place, people's attitudes and fragilities

Sunday Times

I so enjoyed That Green Eyed Girl. The atmosphere of city heat and dust and stifling apartments was so vividly evoked. And I was equally invested in both narrative strands . . . I was hooked from the beginning

Clare Chambers

It's beautifully written and particularly wonderful on forbidden love, loss and forgiveness

Daily Mail

Gripping . . . Julie Owen Moylan vividly recreates drab, grey postwar London and her characters are convincing to the end

The Times

A tale of two sisters and a city, all three of them so vividly drawn, I felt I knew them. An almost unbearably poignant story of missed chances, long-hidden lies and women fighting the odds to grab happiness where they can. Superbly atmospheric, with convincingly flawed characters that just leap off the page

Frances Quinn

An all-singing, all-dancing, moving and masterful book about two complex sisters living in incredibly complex times. Mid-twentieth century Berlin and the glittering world of the Babylon Circus are brilliantly evoked and, as always with Julie Owen Moylan's writing, the characters - astutely rendered, flawed and convincing - live with us long after we've closed the book. Brilliant

Anna Mazzola

The sisters are terrific, unsentimentally and vividly portrayed. So, too, is Berlin, filled with menace, glitter and upcoming destruction. Bold and brave and absorbing

Elizabeth Buchan

With hints of Atonement, this is an epic novel, spanning decades as it explores with compassion and humanity the relationship of two sisters torn between the love and obligation they feel towards one another, and their desire for freedom and a better life that will split them apart. It’s about secrets and hidden truths and the deep and long-lasting consequences of both. Above all it’s a story of missed opportunity, chance, guilt, love and forgiveness. I devoured this novel with its rich, vivid prose and its complex characters, tossed into conflict and dire circumstances through no fault of their own. A deeply thought-provoking and emotional story I will be thinking of long after I finished the final page. Utterly luminous

Louise Fein, author of <i>The London Bookshop Affair</i>