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International bestselling novelist and travel writer Katie Hickman describes the year she spent living with a circus troupe in Mexico. Hickman says she travelled to Mexico in search of magic and found it in the big top, the clowns, the trapeze artists, elephants, torn materials and tarnished sequins that were turned into nights of glittering illusion. Hickman adjusted to the harsh nomadic lifestyle of the circus and befriended many of those working in it. She even performed in the circus herself.

Hickman is the best-selling author of seven books. Her most recent works are the highly-acclaimed novels, The Aviary Gate and The Pindar Diamond, the first and second parts of a trilogy set in early 17th-century Constantinople and Venice. The third and concluding novel, Winter’s Tale, is due for publication in 2015. Her travel books include Travels with a Mexican Circus, shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon, the story of a journey on horseback across the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.