#90 in Romance
The Night Circus
- 512
- Pages
- about 9 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 5 weeks on the list, peaked at #5
- Locus Award for Best First Novel
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Editor’s note Le Cirque des Rêves arrives without warning, opens only after dark and is entirely in black and white; inside it, between 1886 and 1903, two young magicians, Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair, are playing out a contest their teachers bound them to as children without telling them the rules or how it ends, and the circus is the board. Erin Morgenstern began it as a National Novel Writing Month project and published it in 2011; it was her first book, took an Alex Award and a Locus award for first novel, and has been in print in forty languages. Readers who want a plot complain; the book is about atmosphere, tents and the people who follow the circus from city to city, and the romance is almost incidental. About 400 pages.
About the book
The Night Circus is a 2011 speculative fiction novel by Erin Morgenstern. It was originally written for the annual writing competition National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) over the span of three competitions. The novel has a nonlinear narrative written from multiple viewpoints.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.9 across 1,743 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 92% of the weight and the score stays at 7.9 — the Romance average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.2 | 70 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 7.9 | 1.7K | 96% |
Reader voices
The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).
“Slow beginning, picks up after the first hundred pages. Very well thought out, complex storyline, lots of twists, and really well written characters. Incredible aesthetics. When you're finished it leaves you mourning the world and characters. The only fault was the ending... felt a little lazy.”
“I read this book when it first came out and the imagery of the black & white circus has stuck with me ever since. This reread was just as enchanting and magical as the first time I picked it up. It is full of beautiful…”
Frequently asked
How long is The Night Circus?
It has 512 pages — shorter than 56% of the ranked books in Romance.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Romance — with scores between 7.8 and 7.9, closest to this book.
