Roustabout: A Fiction - Softcover

Chalfoun, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060927992 ISBN 13: 9780060927998

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1997

Synopsis

A unique first novel tells the story of a young girl, adopted by a traveling circus at age five, who now at age fifteen has created for herself a bizarre family made up of circus hands, including her lover, the ringcrew chief twenty years her senior. Reprint.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'Life under the Big Top – according to Chalfoun's account – is anything but glamorous. The clown is an alcoholic, the tattooed lady is a heroin addict and the girl on the flying trapeze ends up in a wheelchair. If the author's intention is to show the grim reality under the grease-paint, she has succeeded'
CHRISTINA KONING, 'The Times'

''Roustabout' is a tour de force of narrative energy... it moves through the life of its gritty young heroine, Mat, a tent rigger in a travelling circus, with a tense, pent-up urgency that had me turning the pages as if it were a thriller... Chalfoun makes you see (and smell) the texture of her people's grimy, dead-end lives – pie-plate ashtrays and vinyl-walled trailers and stopped-up Portosans. The despair is palpable... the explosive denouement truly shocking'
VOGUE

'Chalfoun draws the reader into the spell-binding, albeit disturbing, world of circus life... Full of raw energy, 'Roustabout' may leave the reader feeling simultaneously unnerved and oddly hopeful'
SWING

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0060927992
• ISBN 13: 9780060927998
• Binding: Paperback