The Starless Sea

The Starless Sea is a speculative novel by the American writer Erin Morgenstern, published in 2019 and her second book after The Night Circus. It reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list, and it is built to be read as a set of interlocking stories rather than as a single line.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student who finds a book in his university library containing an account of something that happened to him as a child. Following it takes him underground, to a sea with no stars, a harbour of tunnels and rooms full of stories, and into the company of the people who keep the place running and those who want to change it.

Morgenstern builds the novel out of nested stories, symbols and doors, and the plot is as much about the way a tale is assembled as about where Zachary ends up. Readers who liked The Night Circus will recognise the method, and here the structure is the point rather than a device.