This is the stunning, emotional debut novel, first published in 1995, from the unclassifiable but excellent author Jennifer Egan. She gained fame after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her spellbinding A Visit from the Goon Squad. In The Invisible Circus obsession over the death of a sister leads the surviving sibling on a odyssey to discover the truth, unearthing uncomfortable revelations about her family.
In Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation. This novel introduced Egan's remarkable ability to tie suspense with deeply insightful characters and the nuances of emotion.
Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.
