London, 1885—a challenging place for a young, beautiful woman of limited means. But Eliza is modern before her time. She longs for more than the stifling, if respectable, conventionality of marriage, children, domestic drudgery. Through her work as an artist’s model, she meets the magnetic and irascible Devil Wix—a born showman whose dream is to run his own theatre company.
Devil’s right-hand man isCarlo Bonomi, an ill-tempered dwarf who is a talented magician and illusionist. Carlo and Devil clash at every turn and it falls to Eliza to broker an uneasy peace between them. Jasper Button, a mild-mannered family man at heart, is a gifted artist and the unlikely final member of the motley crew. With self-styled impresario Devil at the helm of the Palmyra Theatre, acrobats and illusionists astonish audiences with their death-defying stunts and the magic of mysterious new inventions—like electricity. Backstage, secret romances, box-office dramas, and power struggles inevitably simmer, and intermittently boil over.
Framed by Rosie Thomas’s rich portrayal of the rapidly changing world of late-Victorian England, The Illusionists takes readers on an unforgettable journey with a cast of passionate, larger-than-life figures who are inextricably linked through their shared love of the stage and the theatre, and who will make you laugh and break your heart. And as Eliza is drawn into their seductive, precarious, and exciting bohemian world, she risks not only her heart, but also her life…
