The Wonders — Paddy O'Reilly

A brilliant new novel about a misfit trio who become instant international reality stars, probing the nature of celebrity, disability, and the value of human life.

Perhaps every human being was a freak. Hadn't he read somewhere that every person has at least a handful of damaged genes? That all humans embody a myriad of nature's mistakes?

Meet Leon (stage name: Clockwork Man), a nervous, introverted thirty-year-old man with a brass heart; Kathryn (stage name: Lady Lamb), a brash, sexy woman covered almost entirely with black, tightly furled wool; and Christos (stage name: Seraphiel), a vain performance artist who plays a winged god with the help of ceramic implants inserted between his shoulder blades. These are The Wonders, three extraordinary people whose medical treatments have tested the limits of the human body. When they are brought together by a canny entrepreneur, their glamorous, genre-defying, twenty-first-century circus act becomes a global sensation. But what makes them objects of fascination also places them in danger.

With warmth, humor, and astonishing insight, Paddy O'Reilly has written a wonderful novel that will appeal to fans of Sara Gruen's Ape House, Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Teddy Wayne's The Love Song of Jonny Valentine -- or anyone who's ever questioned the nature of fame, our kinship with the animal kingdom, and the delicate balancing act of life and death.