Cranston Public Library

The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence’s forgotten novel, is a passionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation and destitution.
Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comes of age just as her father’s business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter’s proper upbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the traveling performers he employs is Ciccio,...

Over 10,000,000 copies in print worldwide #1 New York Times Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A Newsday Favorite Book of 2006 A USA Today Bestseller A Major Motion Picture starring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson, and Christoph Waltz   Jacob Janowski's luck had run out--orphaned and penniless, he had no direction until he landed on a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most...

Over a half century, a small Indiana town hosts a circus troupe during the off-seasons in linked stories "as graceful as any acrobat's high-wire act" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A Story Prize Finalist
From 1884 to 1939, the Great Porter Circus made the unlikely choice to winter in an Indiana town called Lima, a place that feels as classic as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and as wondrous as a first trip to the Big...

In the 1920s, during the golden age of the big top, Mabel Stark was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and one of America's most eccentric and unlikely celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and, as the greatest tiger trainer in history, fearlessly courageous. That was then. This is now. It's 1968. Mabel is turning eighty and is about to...

"The night of London's grandest ball, a bold group of women downstairs launch a daring revenge heist against Mayfair society in this dazzling historical novel about power, gender, and class Mrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves, she's made herself respectable, running the grandest home in Mayfair. The place is packed with treasures, a glittering symbol of wealth and power, but dark secrets lurk in the...

"In 1911, Mabel MacGinnis is Europe's strongest woman and has performed beside her father in the Manzo Brothers Circus her entire life. But at his unexpected death, she loses everything she's ever known and sets off in the company of acrobat Jake Cunningham for America in hope of finding the mother she's just discovered is still alive. Isabella Moreau, the nation's most feted aerialist, has given everything to the circus. But age and injury now threaten...

"Here is a dark, passionate tapestry of a young woman's struggle from poverty to wealth . . .of a rebellious heart's tempestuous journey toward love . . . set in the savage contrasts of Georgian England, a time alive with treachery, grandeur and intrigue." --back flap.

Olympia, an albino hunchback dwarf, tells of a carnival family who breeds and trains their children for their freak show.

"An unconventional woman and a man shrouded in mystery walk a tightrope of desire as they race against a killer to find a machine that could change the world"-- Former trapeze artist Amalie Vaughn moved to Burning Cove to reinvent herself, but after spending her inheritance on a mansion with the intention of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast, she learns that the villa is said to be cursed. When the first guest, Dr. Norman Pickwell, is murdered...

"READERS OF ANTHONY HOROWITZ AND JACQUELINE WINSPEAR, WITH A DASH OF AGATHA CHRISTIE, step right up! Murder Under Her Skin is a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring heroines dead set on justice. Someone's put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean "Will" Parker's former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost...