Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter is famous for her sumptuous language, structural playfulness, genre-bending, and seductive, logic-defying plots – and if you like gorgeous lyricism, unforgettable characters, and magical realism (emphasis on the magical), you’ll fall in love with Nights at the Circus. In 1899, journalist Jack Walser meets six-foot-two circus aerialist Fevvers, “the Cockney Venus”. Raised in a brothel and a graduate of freak shows, she’s now a star of the Victorian stage – but are her wings real, as she claims? Walser becomes part of the circus in body and spirit, as, disguised as a clown, he follows Fevvers to… show more.

Meet Fevvers, twice as large as life, the Victorian circus high-wire artiste, Cockney Venus, winged, part bird, part human, found abandoned newly hatched from a great egg, on the steps of a brothel, as she recounts her sprawling stories within stories, of pigs that read and write, of being painted by Toulouse Lautrec, being courted by the Prince of Wales, dining with Colette. “Everywhere she went rivers parted for her, wars were threatened, suns eclipsed, showers of frogs and footwear were reported…”

It’s drunk on language, a lavish, surreal, exuberant, funny, earthy, erotic, brilliantly imaginative work. Enjoy.

Oh Fevvers - "Lor love you!" The opening words of this book chime in my heart like the bow bells. Sophie Fevvers, trapeze artist, Cockney Venus - face like a ‘meat dish,’ Fevvers who keeps her champagne in a cracked toilet bowl, on discarded fish ice from Billingsgate market. As the protagonist in Angela Carter’s magical realist masterpiece, Nights at the Circus, Fevvers lives and breathes London. London is in her nails and her hair, her bum, her voice, her attitude, and most of all in her history – she was hatched from an egg in a London brothel.… show more.