The Bounce

THE BOUNCE is a masterpiece of lion-taming, cross-dressing, lost mothers and lost innocence, set in the glamorous and squalid world of the Victorian circus. Nineteen-year-old Nathan sails the Atlantic in search of the mother who abandoned him. He takes a job as a lion-tamer in a circus south of the Thames, where he meets Lulu, a celebrated rope-dancer with secrets; Nan, the orange-girl, haunted by her dead son and his menacing father; Queen, the lion on whom everything rests, and, at last, his mother - or is she his mother, after all? Like BONE HOUSE, THE BOUNCE is pacy, darkly Gothic and powerfully evocative, but its setting and the characters elevate it to a new level: literary historical fiction at its spine-tingling, compelling best.