THE CIRCUS MONEY

About the Book

First the sun went out over Balchik. The next summer a circus came up the coast road with a tiger nobody ever saw, and Niko learned that a story can be worth more than the truth, if you sell it right.

Bulgaria, around 2000. The internet is rented by the hour, photographs cost money, and a bad decision can still disappear, unless the town turns it into a legend.

Fourteen-year-old Niko grows up in his parents' computer club in Balchik, where every minute has a price. With Rado, Toni, Dani, and Filip, he turns money meant for the circus into the first legend of the year, then builds a childhood from shared passwords, sea-snail money, one-ring phone calls, and risks no adult would approve of.

Niko is good at systems. He reads prices, routes, habits, and games faster than the people around him. His flaw is not that he fails to notice others. He notices too much, then mistakes understanding a pattern for permission to manage it. The cost lands on Kalina, Dara, Rado, and eventually on Niko himself.

Years later, after the photographs are lost, he reconstructs the year he learned that being right and doing right are not the same thing.

Some of these stories happened. Some happened differently. Some did not happen at all.

The Circus Money is an adult literary coming-of-age novel about friendship, first love, class, migration, and the last years before memory became permanent.

He can read every system in town. He cannot read Dara.

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.

Counter-Strike from the beta discs to 1.5. A shared Hardcore character in Diablo II: one life, two boys, one password. ICQ numbers traded like currency, and mIRC where half the coast talked at once.

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.

The year, in chapter titles: One Hour or the Banitsa. Save It Twice. The Blackout. Ring Once. The Night Rate. July Morning. Results Day. The Early Bus.

Walk the routes: the map of Niko's Balchik →

What Things Cost

• One lev: the hour or the banitsa, never both.
• A phone card: a mother's ten minutes a week.
• Rapana: by the piece for tourists, by the effort for boys.
• Three secondhand tents: a year of the jar.
• The tiger: two leva. Nobody ever saw it. It is worth more every year.

For Readers Who Like

• character-driven, adult coming of age
• Counter-Strike, Diablo II, and the internet rented by the hour
• the Bulgarian Black Sea and small-town Eastern Europe
• friendship under class pressure, first love without a neat resolution
• leaving home, and being the one who stays
• literary fiction with humour and narrative momentum
• the shelf between Black Swan Green and The Sense of an Ending

Book Details

• Title The Circus Money
• Series The Offline Years, Book One (a standalone story)
• Author Martin Kostov
• Genre Adult literary / upmarket coming-of-age fiction
• Setting Balchik, Bulgaria, 1999-2002
• Length About 220 pages
• Language English
• Publication Autumn/Winter 2026
• Publisher Offline Years Press
• Formats Kindle at launch; paperback when confirmed; hardcover later

Three Questions

Do I need to know Bulgaria? No. You need to have been twelve.

Is it YA? No: adult literary fiction that remembers being fourteen exactly.

When can I read it? Autumn/winter 2026. The map is open now, and the launch list reads the opening chapters first.

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 →