New York, late 1840s, and in the wild, noisy, brash and beautiful circus of Silas P. Swift a shadowy, mesmeric woman entrances crowds because she can unlock the secrets of troubled minds. Above them all her daughter sweeps and soars: acrobat and tightrope-walker. People cannot take their eyes from the mysterious woman in the Big Top who can help so many others - but she cannot unlock dark, literally unspeakable, memories of her own. In London memories fester in the mind of an old and venomous duke of the realm. He plots, with an unscrupulous lawyer (and a huge financial reward) against the mother and the daughter: to kill one, and to abduct the other and bring her across the Atlantic to him: She is mine. The actress and mesmerist Cordelia Preston and her daughter Gwenlliam live with their unusual family in the exciting new city among exciting new ideas: the telegraph, the daguerrotype, anaesthesia, table-tapping. And among the dangerous street-gangs of New York also, whose raw violence meets Cordelia and Gwenlliam and those that they love, with unexpected results

If I had just read this book last month I'd have decreed it my Best Read for 2013. It was terrific and I liked it much more than Ewing's Mesmerist which was a prequel. I found the developing community in the US fascinting and the way the delicious characters in Swift's circus adapted to such different brash surroundings in the new country was quite rivetting. It was an engrossing read.
Dawn in goodreads had this to say - "This is a sequel to The Mesmerist, in which we leave behind Victorian London for the challenges of the New World.
Cordelia Preston is the head act of Silas P Swift's circus, still performing acts of mesmerism. Her daughter, Gwenlliam, is also part of the troupe, and they have surrounded themselves with an array of wild and wonderful characters who act as a sort of extended family. Their story is of American life in the 1840s, including the Californian Gold Rush, the Gangs of New York, the development of the daguerrotype, racial tensions and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace - all packed into 416 pages!
Alot going on in this book, with little room for fleshing out all of the characters, but I was so focussed on the story, and the fabulous romp across America, a real page-turner through which you will get both the smell of the greasepaint and the whiff of the crowd, most of whom seem intent on redecorating the interior of the Big Top with their tobacco spit...

Highly recommended for fans of entertaining historical fiction.
I found it unforgetable.

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