Enter a world unlike any other, where a dozen languages are spoken and scores of disciplines perfected--or invented; intimate and inscrutable, artistic and athletic, courageous and committed: the private world of the performers in the Cirque du Soleil.. Of the hundreds of artists the Cirque employs, none is more fascinating than Olga Sidorova, who ran away from Siberia at age 14 to follow her dream to fly. When Schreiber met her in March, 2002, she inspired his own global odyssey, following the European tour of Saltimbanco., assisting her after knee surgery at the Cirque's training studio in Montreal, even helping a pair of contortionists apartment hunt in Las Vegas. Dreams of the Solo Trapeze: Offstage with the Cirque du Soleil. is not one book but many: non-fiction novel, biography, cultural history, travel narrative, and love story. Its aim is to discover and pay tribute to these magnificent artists in a manner that reflects the Cirque's own spontaneity, originality and daring.