The Starless Sea

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.

National Bestseller • From the bestselling author of The Night Circus

"A gorgeously written epic love story, filled with magic and mystery." — PopSugar

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the library stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something impossible: a story from his own childhood.

Desperate to understand how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary follows a series of clues — a bee, a key, and a sword — from 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 he finds there is more than 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 stories whispered by the dead. Together with Mirabel, a fierce pink-haired protector, 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.

For readers who believe in the magic of stories, libraries, and the places only books can take you.

📖 Hardcover | 512 pages