Books like Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

In 1895 New York, night‑cleaner Sylvan Threadgill discovers an abandoned baby amid the privies of a tenement district. With his own orphanage past, he vows to locate her family. Meanwhile, Odile Church and her sister Belle, once celebrated performers in their mother’s Coney Island side‑show, are left shattered when the Church burns down and Belle disappears into Manhattan’s underbelly. In a Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum across the river, the young woman Alphie wakes to a confinement she suspects is a trap orchestrated by her husband's overbearing mother. In the ward she meets a mute, ethereal beauty whose extraordinary talent offers a glimmer of hope. As their separate stories cross, the novel traverses the Lower East Side, the glistening spectacle of a human circus, and the harsh reality of institutional care, painting a vivid portrait of turn‑of‑the‑century New York’s hardship, dreams, love, and loneliness.

First publish date: 2015