The Circus in Winter

Cathy Day's debut, The Circus in Winter, came out in 2004. It was a runner-up for the inaugural Story Prize and a finalist for the GLCA New Writers Award and the Great Lakes Book Award.

The book is made of linked stories rather than one continuous narrative, and the town of Lima, Indiana, where the Great Porter Circus keeps its winter quarters, stands in for the author's home town of Peru, Indiana. Day has a family connection to the material: Henry Hoffman, an elephant trainer who worked for the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus and was killed by one of his animals in 1901, was her great-uncle.

The stories are laid out as numbered displays. The first introduces Wallace Porter, who runs a livery stable in Lima and buys up a struggling circus that then takes his name; the second concerns Jennie Dixianna, whose act with a rope wins her a place in the show and makes her Porter's mistress. Around those two the book builds a portrait of a town and a business seen from a number of different lives.