Church of Marvels

'A SKILLFUL TRIUMPH' Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist - 'IRRESISTIBLE' Emma Donoghue, author of RoomNew York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan Threadgill, 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. Odile Church is the girl-on-the-wheel, a second-fiddle act in a show that has long since lost its magic. Odile and her sister Belle were raised in the curtained halls of their mother's spectacular Coney Island sideshow: The Church of Marvels. 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. Alphie 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... 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.

Parry excels in character development. Her novel is a fascinating study in alienation, set in a time when Manhattan, at least from a distance, seemed like the promised land... a strength of Parry's novel is her willingness to look directly into the shadows. This is an unvarnished vision of the 19th century, the Gilded Age by way of Quentin Tarantino... the writing is often exquisite and Parry's imagery is breathtaking, The backdrop for this gripping book is the picturesque poverty and sleaze of New York in the 1900s. It's like the TV show Boardwalk Empire - but without the glamour... The book is packed with enough vivid poetic description of the period to make an impressive historical novel. Add to that the sense of mystery and menace that Parry achieves and the novel reaches another level, Church of Marvels is a beautifully written tale with twists and turns I didn't see coming. I loved the circus-seaside atmosphere mingled with the grit of turn of the century New York, and the large cast of characters possessed with such spirit to survive in terrible circumstances. There were surprises and secrets on every corner, right to the very end, and a bittersweet finale to satisfy the journey taken. A skillful triumph, undertaken with masterful scope., This quite literally marvellous novel takes you on a hallucinatory ride through old New York, until the four threads of its protagonists' lives tangle and tighten like a noose. Irresistible, It's hard to resist a tale set in New York and this one is no different. As four strangers lives become entwined in 1895, their deepest, darkest secrets slowly start to reveal themselves. Just brilliant

Leslie Parry is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was recently a resident at Yaddo and The Kerouac House. Her writing has also received a National Magazine Award nomination and an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013. She lives in Chicago.leslieparry.comtwitter.com/leslieparry