A finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, this "wildly imagined and richly written" ("The Independent") portrait of love and art, set in the years between the two world wars, "confirms Hall's status as one of the most significant and exciting of our younger novelists" ("The Guardian)."

"Wickedly imagined and richly written. . . . Prose as highly colored as Hall's has to to be savored."--The Independent

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.