Lizzie Roberts

Author: Lizzie Roberts

Genres: Literary Fiction

Lyn has a plan to leave this family behind. The family has other ideas

Detroit, 1985. Gwendolyn Oldham, Lyn to everyone but her mother, is seventeen, the eldest of five, and the only adult in a house that has none. Her mother Eleanor, beautiful, charming and constitutionally unable to hold down a job, is a former back-up singer who never quite stopped hoping to hit it big. When a last-ditch move to Nashville ends with the family station wagon in a ditch on the interstate, it's Lyn who guides everyone back to the city and gets the twins to school.

She has a plan: top grades one more year, escape to Yale. Then she meets Darren in a freight elevator, all confidence plus a family with a dining table, and Adrienne, who steals what she wants and isn't afraid of anything, and the plan starts to dissolve. A birthday card arrives from the father who left, postmarked from just across the river. A storage locker suggests Eleanor has been holding back the truth, as well as money. And Lyn is carrying a secret that will not keep until spring.

Narrated in a voice as sardonic as it is tender, Circus Blood is a novel about a girl who has looked after everyone else for so long that she has forgotten how to be looked after. A debut of rare precision from a writer who makes the whole city breathe.

For readers of Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, Tayari Jones's Silver Sparrow, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth.