Sara Gruen's Water For Elephants
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Water for Elephants is a story of a Depression era mudshow that Jacob Jankowki, a down on his luck veterinary student, joins. The fictional circus Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth shows the seamy underbelly of that era of circus. The novel is a little bit on the "typical circus fiction" side, but the writing is great, and if you like the circus, you'll probably like this.
Patti Frazee's Cirkus
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This is also a fictional story of an old mud show, focusing more on freaks such as Mariana , the fortune teller who can turn herself invisible, Shanghai a fire-breathing dwarf, and conjoined twins Atasha and Anna. This time the circus is set in the American midwest at the turn of the century, and the circus is the Borefsky Brothers. It's a debut novel by Patti Frazee, who lives in Minneapolis. It's been getting great reviews.
John Irvings's A Son of the Circus
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A book about an Indian circus, with all of John Irving's weird characters (He wrote The World According to Garp). It's about an Indian born doctor who goes back to India to study circus-dwarves. It's got a lot of exposition, as Irving's books do, but there's gold there-- especially if you like Irving and the circus. Which I do. Not as much about India as you would like though.
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