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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2019, 512 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2020, 592 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Mark Anthony Ayling
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus, a timeless love story set in a secret underground world - a place of pirates, painters, lovers, liars, and ships that sail upon a starless sea.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth.
What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction. Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.
BOOK I
SWEET SORROWS
Once, very long ago ...
There is a pirate in the basement.
(The pirate is a metaphor but also still a person.)
(The basement could rightly be considered a dungeon.)
The pirate was placed here for numerous acts of a piratey nature considered criminal enough for punishment by those non-pirates who decide such things.
Someone said to throw away the key, but the key rests on a tarnished ring on a hook that hangs on the wall nearby.
(Close enough to see from behind the bars. Freedom kept in sight but out of reach, left as a reminder to the prisoner. No one remembers that now on the key side of the bars. The careful psychological design forgotten, distilled into habit and convenience.)
(The pirate realizes this but withholds comment.)
The guard sits in a chair by the door and reads crime serials on faded paper, wishing he were an idealized, fictional version of himself. Wondering if the difference between pirates and thieves is a matter of boats and hats.
After a time he is ...
Morgenstern's novel—littered with knowing references to a slew of beloved storytellers such as Maurice Sendak, C.S. Lewis, Susanna Clarke and Raymond Chandler—is a story lover's utopia, a joyful celebration of reading and language, an unconventional meta-confection as enigmatic as it is enthralling...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Mark Anthony Ayling).
Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek
A spellbinding novel...I could not put it down, and when I finished, I turned immediately back to the first page so I wouldn't have to leave this magical world. If you believe in the power of stories to transcend time and space, to marry love and fate, read this book!
Computer-based role-playing games (RPGs) of the sort Zachary covets in The Starless Sea became popular in the early 1980s with the introduction of Wizardry and Ultima. Both of these games series borrowed liberally from table-top role-playing games, in particular, Dungeons & Dragons, that had become popular during the 1970s. In turn, Wizardry and Ultima would go on to influence later classics such as Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987).
For a period of time in the 1990s, interest in the computer-based RPG format dwindled. However, despite RPG games experiencing a fallow period, the dialogue surrounding the viability of digital media and video games as a platform for storytelling through immersive, complex, participatory ...
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