CIRCUS

A 2013 PEN International/New Voices nominee's debut collection
of award-winning stories that combine the emotional punch,
sharp wit, and disarming charm of Rebecca Lee, Karen Russell
and Neil Smith.

Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Step right up and be prepared to be dazzled by this delightful debut from Claire Battershill, winner of the 2008 CBC Literary Award and co-winner of the 2013 CAA Emerging Writer Award. As Battershill's stories transport us from a circus to the British Museum, and from the Winter Olympics to Miniatureland, they conjure familiar dilemmas as glimpsed through an irresistibly unconventional lens. In "Brothers", a young family moves into an idyllic country home only to have their dreams of the pastoral life disrupted by the inconvenient presence of two elderly shepherds. Jump-a-thons, track meets, and the world of competitive winter sports provide the backdrop for a young man's coming of age in "Two-Man Luge: A Love Story." A hapless English bureaucrat with a long history of failed blind dates gives himself 31 days to find love on the Internet. An enormous blue plastic tent pitched in the middle of a single father's living room becomes an unlikely neighbourhood sensation. And in the CBC Literary Award-winning title story, the granddaughter of a former circus performer (who played the role of a man-wrestling bear) finds herself grappling with the capriciousness of life and love. Filled with an unforgettable all-too-human cast of characters on the cusp of enormous change, these stories are as funny and entertaining as they are poignant and wise. Circus is an extraordinary reminder that sometimes everyday life can be the greatest show on earth. CLAIRE BATTERSHILL won the 2008 CBC Literary Award for Short Fiction for the title story from her debut collection, Circus,and was recently named the co-winner of the 2013 Canadian Authors Association's Emerging Writer Award. She was a Junior Fellow and apprentice printer at Massey College, and, in 2008, she was a research assistant for Margaret Atwood's Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Battershill has a PhD in English Literature and Book History, and has taught English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Born in Dawson Creek, B.C., in 1986, she has lived in Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto. She now lives in London, England, where she teaches at the University of Reading.