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.