The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

This was recommended to me by a friend. It's a debut novel in the vein of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and if you've read that you know the overarching world that this book inhabits as well.

It's sumptuously written, being both beautifully descriptive and able to hold that canvas taught and forbid it from damaging the pace of the story itself. Quite an achievement for a first (published) book.

The story is about love and those who would test themselves, cunning against boldness. In this grand test the subjects, or competitors, depending on who you ask, find that there are more than two ways to view the world and, perhaps the book is also a coming of age story. Indeed, more than one character grows up in this story and parents are notably absent, their guidance and care missing from the lives of the people who populate Morgenstern's Night Circus.

And what a family call the Night Circus home. In the way only a fairy story can provide for, each character is wonderfully eccentric, unique and endearing. No place here for politics, rivalries or petty jealousies - those flaws that do exist are writ large as if we were watching Hepburn on the silver screen.

I realise I'm rambling here a little - apologies - I'm not quite sure what to say. I liked the book tremendously, but I don't know how I feel about it now it's over. The first hundred pages were wearing me out but then the context found its home and the story ripped along. The reasons and construction of much of the world are never explained and this also is a slender hindrance to really settling in to the story. However, the writing is wonderful and makes up for the lack of a cohesive narrative and I think Morgenstern, in her two main characters, develops something fleetingly beautiful - that is love which, when it finds its object, always returns home. That love, how it grows, how it becomes mature, shapes everyone in the story and in the end, whether they're growing up, leaving home, creating or performing for each other, they do so in the shadow of these lovers for whom it seems touch is always beyond their grasp.