Nights at the Circus
  • Published: 31 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781409015338
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

Nights at the Circus

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Dec 2025
Paperback
6 Dec 1994
EBook
31 Oct 2012
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The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series ventures into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

Welcome to the circus - strange, dirty and shameless, this is greatest show on Earth.

Sophie Fevvers is a seductress, a braggart and an aerialiste extraordinaire in Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan.

Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

READER LOVE - JOIN THE CIRCUS:
'My God. What a breathtaking journey.'
'It plays itself out like a fabulous carnival.'
'Now I'm done, and I don't know what to do with myself'
'[B]eautifully written and surprisingly life-affirming, while also being strange, sly, and sexed-up'
'Angela Carter's world is, as always, a dirty, earthy, erotic, yet soaringly ethereal place to spend one's time'

The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.
  • Published: 31 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781409015338
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368
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About the author

Angela Carter

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

portrait photo of Angela Carter

Also by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
The Angela Carter BBC Radio Drama Collection
The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks
Fireworks
The Curious Room
Shaking A Leg
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
See all

Praise for Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language...It is a spell-binding achievement

Literary Review

A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the book achieves a major enchantment

Times Literary Supplement

A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful Gothic that's both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel

Observer

A remarkable book by any standards

Guardian