From the author of the “funny, irreverent, and highly entertaining” (Liane Moriarty, author of The Husband’s Secret) Fine Color of Rust comes a brilliant new novel about a misfit trio who become instant international reality stars, probing the nature of celebrity, disability, and the value of human life.
Perhaps every human being was a freak. Hadn’t he read somewhere that every person has at least a handful of damaged genes? That all humans embody a myriad of nature’s mistakes?
Meet Leon (stage name: Clockwork Man), a nervous, introverted thirty-year-old man with a brass heart; Kathryn (stage name: Lady Lamb), a brash, sexy woman covered almost entirely with black, tightly furled wool; and Christos (stage name: Seraphiel), a vain performance artist who plays a winged god with the help of ceramic implants inserted between his shoulder blades. These are The Wonders, three extraordinary people whose medical treatments have tested the limits of the human body. When they are brought together by a canny entrepreneur, their glamorous, genre-defying, twenty-first-century circus act becomes a global sensation. But what makes them objects of fascination also places them in danger.
With warmth, humor, and astonishing insight, Paddy O’Reilly has written a wonderful novel that will appeal to fans of Sara Gruen’s Ape House, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine—or anyone who’s ever questioned the nature of fame, our kinship with the animal kingdom, and the delicate balancing act of life and death.
Praise for The Wonders:
“In a novel that feels both sharply realistic and wildly, indelibly imaginative, O'Reilly offers a story about the stars of a glamorous freak show that sidesteps any expectations of sentimental quirk with wit and deep feeling…The impossible slides skillfully into the believable here; O'Reilly's delightful novel never shirks its responsibility to emotional truth as it tells a story about being known and being different.”
“Full of the humour and quick wit that attracted readers to O’Reilly’s previous novel, The Fine Color of Rust.... The Wonders asks how and why those who differ from the norm are desired or condemned by those who sit comfortably within it. This insight into the private lives of extraordinary people is reminiscent of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, and The Wonders has a similarly broad appeal.”
“In The Wonders, O’Reilly uses difference to not only tell a great story, but to show us things that are so familiar we forget to notice them.”
“The Wonders is a surreal and exotic thing, a finely wrought interrogation of the ways we navigate being human and the presumptuous shambles we make of much of it.... Here, then, are basic human sensations played out against a backdrop of over-the-top circumstance and performance, and O’Reilly controls their intricacies with the sureness of a tightrope walker.”
