Circus Home
In 1978 I used to drive from New Brunswick, New Jersey to Baltimore, Maryland every few weeks. Since I was a starving student, I routinely drove the backroads to save money on turnpike tolls. Each time I made the trip, someplace deep in South Jersey back country, I passed a billboard standing in a deserted lot that read “Future Site of The New Jersey Home for Retired Circus and Carnival Performers.” I didn’t know if it was real, if there were actually plans to build such a home or if it was some sort of avant-garde performance art. For forty years I thought there was a novel there. I finally wrote that novel.
Circus Home.
Circus Home captures the lives of the residents of The New Jersey Home for Retired Circus and Carnival Performers through an array of stories that take place from 1887 to the present in a sweep of locations across the world. The novel brims with rich detail that illuminates a unique world populated by lively characters you will enjoy being close to as you savor their life stories. If you enjoyed Gower’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Doctorow’s Ragtime or even Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, you will delight in Circus Home!