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Published Feb 2004
440 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In the 1910s and '20s, during the golden age of the big top, Mabel Stark was the superstar of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, and one of America's most eccentric celebrities. A tiny, curvaceous Kentucky blonde in a white leather bodysuit, Mabel was brazen, sexually adventurous, and suicidally courageous. The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is Robert Hough's brilliant, highly acclaimed novelization of her fantastic life.
It is 1968 - Mabel is just turning eighty and is about to lose her job at Jungleland, a Southern California game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger Rajah. Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel's exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.
"Robert Hough's rollicking debut novel...is filled to the brim with cinematic moments and larger-than-life characters. Mabel Stark is the largest of them all..." - The Washington Post
"The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is one of the most rollicking, good-time books of the year." - USA Today
"The novel's captivating depiction of circus life is matched by Hough's furious plotting -- every few pages bring the hint of a secret, a riled tiger, a handsome stranger, a career twist or the surprise reappearance of a past friend or foe." - The New York Times
"Rich in the atmosphere of circus life, this graphic, slangy fictional reminiscence also offers some surprising, deft metafictional touches." - Publishers Weekly
"A marvelous debut...Just about perfect. One of the most entertaining novels in many a year." - Kirkus
This information about The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robert Hough is the author of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark (2001); The Stowaway (2004) which was listed on The Boston Globe's Top Ten Books of the Year and was nominated for the Dublin-Impac Writer's Prize; and The Culprits (2007), a satire about global warfare which was nominated for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and The Trillium Award.
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