‘Robert Hough’s fictionalised big-top biog packs in the laughs and tears… Running away with the circus has never looked so good.’ – Elle

Mabel was five-feet tall, brazen, suicidally courageous, obsessed with tigers and sexually eccentric. In The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, Robert Hough has used the documents of her life to explore the mysteries of her heart. His vibrant and moving fictional autobiography starts in 1968. Mabel is just turning eighty and is about to lose her job. Faced with the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life, her escapades and her tragedies, her love affairs with tigers and men. She also confronts her darkest secret, her guilt at committing, ‘the worst thing one person can do to another.’ Now, with the end of her life in sight, there is one thing above all else she needs to do. Mabel Stark wants to confess.

‘The story steams along like a Ringling train… It’s impossible not to warm to Hough’s plucky, masochistic adventuress, fleeing the wraths of insanity and across every state in the Union; she’s the sanest nutter the confession bug ever bit’ Observer

‘Hough has produced a work which captures the complexity and ambiguity of life’ Times Literary Supplement

‘A must read’ Tatler

‘Unputdownable… Mabel’s story has grip and gumption along with bucket-loads of sadness and self-destructive glamour’ Time Out

‘As she swaggers through the book, Mabel’s feisty character comes across as an undoubted star’ Marie Claire

‘Hough has found a voice and tone - prickly and pathetic, sly and wounded - that fits Mabel as snugly as her soiled leather suit’ Economist

‘Hilarious… It is frankly impossible not to fall in love with the heroine, a woman other women would like to be, and men would like to tame… This book is an uplifiting account of a life lived to the hilt… Captivating’ Irish Examiner

‘A splendid rumbustious recreation of her bizarre life that simply demands to be read’ Woman and Home