A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all.New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her.A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both.As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.

Product Description:  "A first-rate choice for fans of intelligent historical romances."—Library Journal, starred review Amid the mayhem of the Civil War, Iris Dunleavy is put on trial by her husband, convicted of madness, and sent to Sanibel Asylum to be restored to a compliant Virginia plantation wife...read more

'A fictional account of a doctor in post-Civil War Louisiana who exposes the head of a women's asylum as a fraud and a murderer, built around themes of mysogyny and racism'--Provided by publisher.

Recounts how the author, a grandson of the Spanish Communist Party secretary general in 1960s Moscow, was abandoned to a life of institutions and orphanages due to his cerebral palsy and endured a childhood rife with neglect, emotional mistreatment, and small pleasures. Winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize. Reprint.

Product Description: Penn County, Indiana, like all rural areas in the early 1900's, is in the process of changing forever. The horse and buggy days are fading away, as are the mores of the Victorian era. With WWI on the winds of the American landscape, the children of the one room schoolhouse begin to drift apart...read more

Elinor Caskey uses her mysterious powers to control the small town of Perdido and make her family flourish despite the turmoil of World War II