The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Are you lost or are you exploring?
When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a strange book hidden in his university library it leads him on a quest unlike any other. Its pages entrance him with their tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities and nameless acolytes, but they also contain something impossible: a recollection from his own childhood.
By Iris
Erin Morgenstern’s first – and for quite a while there, only – book The Night Circus has been one of my favourites ever since a fellow student recommended it to me during a university trip. I was very excited when The Starless Sea came out some eight years later, but also slightly apprehensive that it wouldn’t live up to my (admittedly pretty high, at this point) expectations. Turns out I was wrong about that!
The Starless Sea is a little hard to describe, mostly because it gets… kinda weird. At the core of the story is Zachary Rawlins, who finds a book that doesn’t exist while studying in his university library, and inadvertently gets caught up in an ever-growing web of mystery, intrigue, and books. As you progress through the narrative, which contains many stories-within-stories and seems to move through multiple dimensions of reality, time and space begin to mean less and less.
The important thing, though, and the thing that really hooked me and made me want to keep reading deep into the night, is that the writing is just as beautifully descriptive and atmospheric as The Night Circus, with vivid and fascinating main characters and a world that engages all of your senses – even if you’re just staring at ink on paper.
Rife with references to literature, libraries, bookstores and reading rooms (as well as other forms of storytelling, such as video games), this is a book for people who love books. That’s all of us, right?
