The Night Circus

The Night Circus is a standalone speculative novel by Erin Morgenstern, published in 2011. Morgenstern wrote it for the National Novel Writing Month competition over three separate years, and it is told in a nonlinear order from several points of view, with the dates of the chapters moving back and forth across the same decades, which means the reader assembles the story in a different sequence from the one in which it happens.

Le Cirque des Rêves arrives without warning and opens only at night. Inside its black-and-white tents the audience sees illusionists, fortune-tellers and attractions that ignore the ordinary laws of physics, and the whole performance disappears as quietly as it came, in a new city each time. The circus keeps no schedule, and the people who follow it from place to place have made it part of their lives.

Behind the tents, two magicians are playing a game that only one of them can finish. Celia and Marco were trained from childhood by rival instructors for exactly this contest, and neither of them was given the choice to decline; the stakes were set by other people before the two of them met. The circus was built as their board, and the performers and regular visitors caught up in it are as invested in the result as the players are.

The novel assembles its story out of the tents, the performers and a duel that turns into something neither participant was taught to expect, and it does so in a deliberately out-of-order sequence. It is a fairy tale in tone, set in an invented version of the Victorian period, and it remains Morgenstern's best-known work.