A sideshow performer, a pair of asylum escapees, and an orphaned boxer converge in Parry’ s intricately braided novel of secretsand hidden identities. ” — O, The Oprah Magazine
New York, 1895. A newborn baby is found abandoned in the muck of the privies behind a row of tenement houses. Her fate becomes the responsibility of four strangers, whose own lives become increasingly connected as 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 and dreams, love and 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, a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless.
“ This quite literally marvelous novel takes you on a hallucinatory ride through old New York, until the four threads of its protagonists’ lives tangle and tighten like a noose. Irresistible. ” — Emma Donoghue, author of Room
