Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The author of the enchanting Big Fish moves to Doubleday with a literary novel that is more sophisticated and accomplished than anything he's written before. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is told in Daniel Wallace's signature style, where everything is somehow magical and nothing is ever exactly what it seems. This story is set in the American South in the early to mid-1900s and tells the charming yet haunting story of Henry Walker, whose life is changed forever when he crosses paths with the Devil, who teaches him magic and then steals the one thing that means the most to him. The tale begins in the 1940s, with Jeremiah Musgrove's Chinese Circus, where Henry is the resident magician. Despite his utter failure actually performing magic, Henry is a novelty with crowds because he is black with emerald green eyes. Early on, Henry meets trouble in the form of three angry (white) teenagers who steal him away and threaten his life. In his absence, Henry's story is told through the voices of his friends from the circus: Jenny the Ossified Girl, Rudy the Strong Man, and JJ the Barker, each of them sharing what they know of Henry's life--a tale that is simultaneously haunting, spell-binding, heartbreaking, and unbelievable.
Synopsis
Henry Walker was once a world-class magician, performing to sold-out shows in New York. But now he has been reduced to joining Musgrove's Chinese Circus (which at no point in its tour of the deep South has ever included a single Chinese person) as the shambling Negro Magician, whose dark black skin and electric green eyes bewitch most audiences. But one balmy Mississippi night in 1954, Henry disappears in the company of three rowdy white teens and is never seen again. Wallace pieces together Henry's incredible vagabond life - from a deal with a bone-white devil known only as Mr. Sebastian, to the heartrending loss of his sister Hannah - and creates an enchanting tale of love, loss, identity, and the limitation of magic.