STEP RIGHT UP, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! – THE ENTERTAINMENT IS ABOUT TO BEGIN! THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN – IN YOUR TOWN – WHEREVER THAT MAY BE!
Billy Jenkins’ career spans the years 1895-1954. He was King of the Cowboys, the most popular act in all Germany, hero of German pulp fiction – the last genuine hero of the “American” Wild West. Yet, like Karl May before him, he never set foot in America...
Billy became one of the world’s earliest superstars. He thrilled millions between the two World Wars, built a palatial mansion on the hill in Berlin, complete with a dude ranch in his backyard. In 1932, after joining the Nazi Party, he became their favorite, and soon reached the pinnacle of his success – this, despite the fact that he was half-Jewish! As his star waned, not because he was Jewish but because his name sounded too American as Germany entered World War II, Billy rediscovered his Jewish roots, and… but that’s for the reader to find out.
Daredevil artistes and bawdy clowns, wild beasts and untamable women – with best-selling author Hugo Gerstl as ringmaster – make for a novel that is as thrilling as any show on earth. Yet, Billy Jenkinsis more than thrilling. It is also a tour of the first half of twentieth-century Europe, from the invention of the motor car and the airplane to the collapse of centuries-old dynasties and – even more – a portrait of a continent on the brink of cataclysmic change, of the death of empires, the emergence of new nations, and a holocaust unmatched in any civilization – in short, the birth of modern Europe.
It is a Europe we see from the Chapiteau, where giantess and dwarf, beauty and monstrosity, charlatan and prince, work together only to entertain. Bright and exotic, Billy Jenkinsis filled with circus lore. It is superb entertainment, a novel you will devour with relish and remember long after you put it down.
Hugo Gerstl, nationally famous American trial lawyer, world traveler and author of the best-sellers Scribe: The Only Female Pope, Amazing Grace: The Woman Pirate, The Motherland Trilogy: A Turkish Saga, Misfire, and Standoff, which so far have been translated into Portuguese, Czech, and Turkish,lives in Carmel, California with his wife Lorraine, a writer and teacher. Together they have raised five children, now grown.
An E-book English-Language edition was published in Spring 2011 by SWS Inc., CA.
