ISBN: 9781836568704
(Lia’s Story, Book 1),
Boldwood Books, 10th November 2025
Paris, 1943. Lia, once a celebrated trapeze artist, returns to the circus she left eighteen years earlier, bringing two orphaned Jewish children she has promised to protect. Within the world of Le Cirque Casini, where outsiders have always found shelter, she hopes to hide them from the Nazis. But Lia carries her own heartbreak, a baby lost to her years ago, and danger is closing in.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
The novel opens with Lia on her hundredth birthday, looking back on how she survived the Nazis and saved other children while living with a Roma circus. It’s a dual-time framing that gives the story a warm, reflective tone, and Lia herself is a genuinely compelling heroine. Courageous but vulnerable, shaped by her own loss, she is the emotional anchor of the book, and her determination to protect the children in her care drives the story from start to finish.
The setting is the novel’s most distinctive strength. A circus hiding children in plain sight in Occupied Paris is an original and vivid idea, and Bacarr makes the most of the contrast between spectacle and menace: trapeze artists still fly and clowns still make the crowds laugh, while the city around them lives in fear. The Roma and Jewish children’s storyline is handled with real feeling, and the emotional impact lands powerfully without losing sight of the human cost of the period. The historical detail is also strong, and the writing is warm, accessible, and well suited to the material.
My one reservation is the pacing. The plot felt uneven at times, with some stretches that move briskly and others that lose a little momentum, and this slightly blunts the tension in a story that should be relentlessly gripping.
That is a modest criticism of an otherwise moving, memorable, and beautifully realised WWII novel. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction about the war, and I’ll certainly be reading Book 2.
I received an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.
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