The Night Circus
The circus arrives without warning. Le Cirque des Rêves opens only at night, a wonderland of black-and-white tents where the impossible feels ordinary and every attraction is more marvelous than the last. What its enchanted visitors never guess is that the circus is also the arena for a hidden contest — a duel between two young illusionists, Celia and Marco, bound to each other by their teachers since childhood and pitted against one another in a game whose rules neither fully understands.
As Celia and Marco pour their magic into the circus, weaving ever more astonishing spectacles, they do the unthinkable: they fall in love. But the game can have only one outcome, and the fates of everyone drawn into the circus's orbit — performers, patrons, and a pair of star-crossed dreamers — hang on how it ends.
Erin Morgenstern's bestselling debut, The Night Circus, is a lush, atmospheric fantasy of wonder, illusion, and forbidden love, told in prose as intricate and beautiful as the circus it conjures.
An illusionist raised to compete in the circus's hidden game.
Celia's unseen opponent and eventual love.
The grey-suited man who sets the contest.
Celia's father and magician-mentor.
A Concord farm boy drawn to the circus, whose thread runs alongside the main contest.
No. The Night Circus is a standalone novel with no sequel. It was Erin Morgenstern's debut, published by Doubleday in 2011; her second novel, The Starless Sea (2019), is a separate, unrelated story.
The novel runs from 1873 to 1903, in a lightly ahistorical Victorian era. Its chapters are dated and move between London, New York and Concord, Massachusetts, following Le Cirque des Reves as it travels.
Jim Dale narrates the audiobook, which runs about 13 hours and 41 minutes. It was released by Penguin Random House Audio on 13 September 2011, alongside the hardcover.