Travels with a
Mexican Circus
by Katie Hickman
Travels with a Mexican Circus is an unforgettable and mesmerising account of a year-long journey through an extraordinary and bizarrely beautiful country.
Travels with a
Mexican Circus
‘The most ambitiously imaginative sort of travel writing’
Patrick Skene Catling
Katie Hickman went to Mexico in search of magic. And amidst the cruel poverty of the country’s capital city, she found it in the circus, with its Big Top, clowns, trapeze artists, elephants – where cheap, torn materials and tarnished sequins were transformed into nights of glittering illusion. Gradually adjusting to the harsh ways of the circus’s nomadic lifestyle and befriending the people who dedicate their lives to it, she soon became completely bewitched by this new world, eventually performing in the circus herself.
Travels with a Mexican Circus is an unforgettable and mesmerising account of a year-long journey through an extraordinary and bizarrely beautiful country.
Travels with a Mexican Circus
‘A delight … The stories of the cirqueros themselves read like tales by Gabriel García Márquez … A very good travel book indeed.’
Harpers & Queen
‘Magic is at the heart of Hickman’s narrative, not just in the fabulous illusions of the acts themselves or the superstitions of the circus people, but in the fantastic stories of the characters she presents.’
Sunday Times
‘Mexico will not have been portrayed more vividly since Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads …
Enchanting’
Daily Telegraph
BIOGRAPHY
Katie Hickman is the best-selling author of ten books. Her most recent work, Brave Hearted, was preceded by She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600 - 1900 (published in 2019), and by the highly-acclaimed series of novels, The Aviary Gate, The Pindar Diamond and The House at Bishopsgate, a trilogy set in early seventeenth century Constantinople, Venice, London, and rural Wiltshire.
She is also the author of two best-selling history books, Courtesans and Daughters of Britannia, which between them have sold more than quarter of a million copies worldwide. Her other works include two travel books, Travels with a Mexican Circus (republished by Bloomsbury in August 2014) which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1993, and Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon, the story of a journey on horseback across the forbidden Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Her first novel, The Quetzal Summer, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. Her books have been translated into 20 languages.
Katie Hickman lives on a converted barge on the Thames in London with her partner, the designer Matthew Ruscombe-King.