Excerpt from Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He’d made it to the new world in steerage—no fine Meissen china anymore—and found himself a bed and a job. He was starting over. Barnum’s stable was a good enough place to wait for spring, when he could go out and look for building work. He thought of Raj, the Bengal tiger, who’d lain shivering in his fourth-story cage in the museum when last the stableman made his rounds. Of all the animals he cared for, Raj was the one he most identified with—his grace and frustration, his power and imprisonment, his obvious desire to burst forth and do something grander than slouch around Barnum’s. He could devour the world if he weren’t chained up in that cage. The stableman felt the same way. He was aware that, cold and poor as he was, the bottom was miles below. What he didn’t see, though, our stableman, was how close he lay to the edge of that abyss, how soon he was going to roll off into it.

That early March night had been frigid, so what then was this feeling that crept over him now—heat? Baking, burning heat. Could it be, he wondered, that he’d frozen to death? If so, he thought, Hell wasn’t quite what the faithful imagined. There was no settlement, no knowledge. Ignorance of Heaven and God persisted, but more cruelly—devoid now of any suspense or hope. Nor, yet, was it the nothingness that he’d expected.So what was going on? The smell of burning horsehair reached him next, and he glimpsed where he was: in a stable. Not Heaven, not Hell, not with the girl from his dream; but neither was this his father’s house in the city or his uncle’s farm. He began to identify the sounds that had roused him: animals’ screams, the trumpeting of an elephant, the banging of animal bodies into metal bars and latched stall doors. He was in the circus stable of Barnum’s Museum, on Broadway, in Manhattan. Yellow flames jetted up in one corner through the smoke that billowed around him. The splintery barn wall by his cot was hot against his cheek; dark wisps of smoke swirled into every orifice. Barnum’s was on fire.

Excerpted from Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Gaffney. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.