A Trip to the Light Fantastic: Travels With a Mexican Circus

Katie Hickman went to Mexico looking for magic. She found it in the circus - Big Top, clowns, elephants and all - where cheap, torn materials and tarnished sequins are transformed into nights of glittering illusion. Gradually adjusting to the harsh ways of the circus's nomadic lifestyle she soon became absorbed into this hypnotic new world, at first as a foreigner, but later as 'La Gringa Estrella', a performer in her own right.Hickman's unforgettable account of her epic year-long journey through an extraordinary and bizarrely beautiful country has all the power and richness of a novel.