Books like Nights at the Circus
A winged cockney trapeze artist at the turn of the century is investigated by a sceptical American reporter who then joins her circus tour across Russia.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Nights at the Circus
Wise Children
On her seventy-fifth birthday, a showgirl twin recounts a century of her scandalous theatrical family.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
A young man is sent across a country where a mad scientist's machines make desires manifest and dismantle reality.
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
A CIA agent cursed by an Amazonian shaman to die if his feet touch the ground travels from Peru to a Vatican archive in search of a suppressed prophecy.
Tom Jones
A foundling in eighteenth-century England careers through adventures, amorous encounters, and moral tests on his way to discovering his true parentage and winning the woman he loves.
Colas Breugnon
A year in the life of Colas Breugnon, a fifty-year-old carpenter and wine-lover of Clamecy in Burgundy in the early 1600s, who tells his story through war, plague and family with unshakeable good humour.
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a terrorist attack on their plane over the English Channel, and Gibreel begins turning into the archangel Gabriel while Saladin turns into a goatish devil, in a novel about migration, identity and faith.
Whale
Across twentieth-century Korea, the scheming businesswoman Geumbok and her giant, silent daughter Chunhui, who becomes a brick-maker, pass through boom towns, prisons and a whale-shaped cinema in a sprawling comic fable.
The Moor's Last Sigh
The last of a Bombay spice-trading dynasty, a man ageing at twice the normal speed, tells the story of his family and of his mother, a great painter who put them all in her canvases.
The Tin Drum
A boy born with a scream that can shatter glass drums his way through the horrors of Nazi Germany, refusing to grow up in a world not worth being adult in.
The Flounder
A talking flounder, first caught by a fisherman in the Stone Age, is put on trial by a feminist tribunal in 1970s Berlin for the advice he has given men through history, while the narrator tells of the cooks he has loved down the ages.
The Master and Margarita
The Devil visits 1930s Moscow with a giant cat, a naked witch, and a vaudeville show, exposing the lies of Soviet society while a novelist rewrites the story of Pontius Pilate.
Possession
Two modern academics discover a cache of love letters between two Victorian poets and become entangled in a parallel romance of their own.