Gruen, Sara

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival.

Horse enthusiast Annemarie Zimmer returns to her father's farm to help train horses twenty years after her prized horse was injured.

Ninety-year-old Jacob Jankowski is haunted by memories of his life as a young veterinarian for a circus during the Great Depression, recalling the bond he developed with Rosie, the show's troubled elephant, and Marlena, the star of the equestrian act who was married to August, who the head animal trainer.

Annemarie, a world-class equestrienne whose dreams of Olympic glory were destroyed at age eighteen when she was injured and her horse killed in a riding accident, returns to her parents' riding school in New Hampshire twenty years later as a divorced mother with her troubled daughter in tow, and finds herself drawn back into the world she had vowed to leave behind forever.

Ninety-year-old Jacob Jankowski finds himself haunted by memories of his past in the circus and the freaks, exotic animals, and other people he encountered as a performer.

Isabel Duncan, a scientist at the Great Ape Language Lab, embarks on an adventure with reporter John Thigpen to rescue a family of bonobos that escaped from her lab and have been cast on a reality television program.

Ninety-year-old Jacob Jankowski finds himself haunted by memories of his past in the circus and the freaks, exotic animals, and other people he encountered as a performer.