THE CIRCUS MONEY

About the Book

Bulgaria, early 2000s. The internet is rented by the hour, camera phones are still terrible, and a group of schoolboys around a family-run computer club are about to learn that the fastest way to become legends is to make decisions no adult would approve of.

There is money meant for the circus and a plan that quietly turns it into something else. There are alliances, debts, and a code only the boys understand. And there is Nikolay Markov, who can read a room, a system, and a price faster than anyone, and who is about to meet the one thing he cannot read.

The Circus Money begins The Offline Years, an adult coming-of-age series about friendship, first love, risk, memory, and the strange mercy of growing up before every mistake could be uploaded. Years later, one of them still has to work out which risks were freedom, and which were only escape.

The World of The Circus Money

A fading town on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. A computer club that sells time by the hour and status by the session. Cheap phones, dial-up patience, long summers, and the particular freedom that only exists when nobody is recording.

It is a world before smartphones and social media, before every face had a feed and every mistake a permanent home. The boys build their own mythology out of small crimes and large loyalties, and the town, as towns do, keeps retelling each story until it changes shape.

For Readers Who Like

• friendship and risk in equal measure
• the last pre-smartphone years
• small-town Eastern Europe
• first love and its long memory
• funny, tender, literary coming-of-age

Book Details

• Title The Circus Money
• Series The Offline Years, Book One
• Author Martin Kostov
• Genre Adult coming-of-age fiction / Contemporary fiction
• Setting Bulgaria, early 2000s
• Publication Coming soon
• Publisher Offline Years Press

Author

Martin Kostov grew up on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and has spent his working life on the other side of the machines this book remembers. He now lives in Sofia. The Circus Money is his first novel. Press & media information →