Church of Marvels — Leslie Parry

In Leslie Parry's ravishing first novel set in vibrant and tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, 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 burned 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, dreams, love, 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, this marvelous debut will leave readers breathless.