Like The Night Circus, The Starless Sea is a prose heavy book. Morgenstern does an amazing job with both of those. I’m a sucker for books about books and good prose. This is a story about stories, told in fragments, between pages of other books, through mazes, puzzles, time and fate. The Starless Sea was published in 2019 and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. I reread it every few years and have been waiting for Morgenstern to write another book. The Night Circus is one of my favourite books. As Zachary, Mirabel, and Dorian venture deeper into the space and its histories and myths, searching for answers and each other, a timeless love story unspools, casting a spell of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a Starless Sea. But a battle is raging over the fate of this place and though there are those who would willingly sacrifice everything to protect it, there are just as many intent on its destruction. Amid twisting tunnels filled with books, gilded ballrooms, and wine-dark shores Zachary falls into an intoxicating world soaked in romance and mystery. These strangers guide Zachary through masquerade party dances and whispered back room stories to the headquarters of a secret society where doorknobs hang from ribbons, and finally through a door conjured from paint to the place he has always yearned for. Suddenly a turn of the page brings Zachary to a story from his own childhood impossibly written in this book that is older than he is.Ī bee, a key, and a sword emblazoned on the book lead Zachary to two people who will change the course of his life: Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired painter, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances. When he discovers a mysterious book in the stacks of his campus library he begins to read, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities, and nameless acolytes. He follows a silent siren song, an inexplicable knowledge that he is meant for another place. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searching for his door, though he does not know it. The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight.

Far beneath the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern