Travels with a Mexican Circus

Description

Katie Hickman went to Mexico looking for magic. She found it in the circus - Big Top, clowns, elephants and all - where cheap, torn materials and tarnished sequins are transformed into nights of glittering illusion. Gradually adjusting to the harsh ways of the circus's nomadic lifestyle, she soon became absorbed into this hypnotic new world, at first as a foreigner but later as 'La Gringa Estrella', a performer in her own right. Travels with a Mexican Circus is an unforgettable account of a year-long journey through an extraordinary and bizarrely beautiful country.

Katie Hickman is the author of several previous books, including history books, travel narratives, and novels. She has been shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and for the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year award. Hickman lives in London with her two children and her husband, the philosopher A.C. Grayling.

A wonderful writer ... An adventure hard to beat in terms of sheer exotic allure * Guardian * A delight... The stories of the cirqueros themselves read like tales by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... Katie seems as deliberate and calculating as Paul Theroux poring over his railway timetables ... a very good travel book indeed * Harpers & Queen * Mexico will not have been portrayed more vividly since Graham Greene's the Lawless Roads... Enchanting * Daily Telegraph * Magic is at the heart of Hickman's narrative, not just in the fabulous illusions of the acts themselves or the superstitions of the circus people, but in the fantastic stories of the characters she presents * Sunday Times * The most ambitiously imaginative sort of travel writing * Patrick Skene Catling *