The Circus: A Novel

By: Jonas Karlsson

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Synopsis: A real-life vanishing act leaves one man looking for his missing friend in this Kafkaesque new novel from the author of The Room and The Invoice. The gentle, off-beat narrator of The Circus is perfectly content with his quiet life. By day he works in a bakery, and by night he obsessively organizes and reorganizes his record collection: it&’s all just the way he likes it. But when his childhood friend Magnus comes calling out of the blue, the contours of our narrator&’s familiar world begin to shift. On a visit to the circus together, Magnus volunteers to participate in the magician&’s disappearing act, and midway through the routine he vanishes. Is this part of the act? What&’s happened to Magnus? And who is it calling on the phone in the dead of night, breathing into the receiver, but never saying a word? Smart, sharply unsettling, and with its sleight of hand exquisitely kept, The Circus is a funhouse mirror of a read—one that ingeniously reveals the way we see ourselves and the stories we tell.