There are certain books that do not simply tell a story but cast a spell. They wrap themselves around your heart like tendrils of midnight fog, and when you turn the final page, you find yourself quite stranded—longing for magic that has slipped through your fingers like smoke.
If you have wandered the black-and-white tents of Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, if you have tasted the caramel and dreamed in starlight, then you understand this particular ache. The circus has packed up and vanished, and you are left standing in an ordinary world that feels rather too grey.
But take heart! For there exist other doorways to step through, other books woven with the same gossamer threads of magic and longing. Let us venture forth together.
Caraval by Stephanie Garber
Imagine, if you will, a game where nothing is quite as it seems—where the line between performance and peril blurs like watercolours in rain. Young Scarlett Dragna has dreamed her whole life of attending Caraval, that legendary competition orchestrated by the mysterious Legend himself.
When she finally arrives, her sister vanishes into the velvet darkness of the game, and Scarlett must navigate a labyrinth of illusions to find her. The magic here tastes of candy and danger in equal measure. Sisterhood pulses at its heart, fierce and unbreakable, reminding us that the truest magic often wears the face of love.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
Here is a tale to break and mend your heart in the same breath. In 1714, a desperate young woman strikes a bargain with darkness itself—eternal life, but at a terrible cost. Every soul she meets forgets her the moment she turns away.
For three hundred years, Addie LaRue wanders through history, a ghost among the living, leaving her mark only in the art she inspires. Then, impossibly, someone remembers her name. Schwab has crafted a meditation on memory and meaning that shimmers with the same wistful beauty found beneath Morgenstern’s circus tents.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Once upon a time—though perhaps it was really the early 1800s—English magic had dwindled to nothing but dusty books and theoretical debate. Then came Mr Norrell, a reclusive gentleman with actual power, who made cathedral statues speak and raised a lady from death itself.
His arrival awakens something sleeping, and soon a rival appears: the brilliant, reckless Jonathan Strange. Their partnership and eventual enmity reshapes England’s magical destiny. Clarke writes with the elegant precision of a Victorian novelist, her footnotes dancing with scholarly mischief, her world as meticulously constructed as any circus tent.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Clarke returns with something altogether stranger—a house of infinite halls, where statues line every corridor and tides sweep through chambers without warning. Our narrator knows this impossible architecture as his entire world, tending to the dead he finds and recording the movements of ocean and cloud.
But who is he, truly? And who is the Other who visits twice weekly? This slim volume unfolds like a paper flower, each revelation more astonishing than the last. It is a meditation on wonder, on the way enchantment can remake us utterly, told with the gentleness of someone who has found peace in mystery.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
January Scaller grows up surrounded by wonders—artifacts from impossible places, collected by her absent father for a wealthy patron. Yet she is told to be practical, to forget the door she once found as a child, the one that opened onto somewhere else entirely.
Then a strange book falls into her hands, and she discovers that doors to other worlds are scattered across the earth like secrets. Harrow writes with ink that seems to glow, each sentence a small magic. Her story speaks of freedom and belonging, of the courage required to step through thresholds into the unknown.
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
In 1899 New York, two mythical beings find themselves adrift. Chava is a golem, woman-shaped clay brought to life, whose master died before their ship reached harbour. Ahmad is a jinni, ancient and fierce, accidentally freed from a copper flask after a thousand years of imprisonment.
They meet in the immigrant neighbourhoods of Manhattan, two impossible creatures trying to pass as human. Wecker weaves Jewish and Arabic folklore together with the threads of historical fiction, creating something that feels both timeless and urgently alive. The friendship between these two lost souls illuminates what it means to be other, to be lonely, to be found.
The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
Nahri survives on the streets of 18th-century Cairo through cleverness and a talent for healing that she cannot quite explain. During a con gone wrong, she accidentally summons a djinn warrior, and everything she believed about herself crumbles to ash.
She is swept away to Daevabad, the legendary city of brass, where djinn politics simmer with ancient resentments and her mere existence threatens to ignite a war. Chakraborty builds her world with the intricate beauty of arabesque tilework—each detail precise, each revelation deepening the pattern.
Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor
A hotel that appears in a different city each morning, its halls filled with impossible enchantments and whispered secrets—what young dreamer could resist such an invitation? Jani and her sister Zosa sign on as staff, eager to escape their dreary lives.
But the Hotel Magnifique hides cruelty beneath its glamour. The servants have been stripped of memories, bound by unbreakable contracts, and the mysterious maître d’hôtel rules with elegant tyranny. Taylor’s debut sparkles with the same bittersweet magic as Morgenstern’s circus, asking what price we pay for wonder.
The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale
In 1906 London, there exists a shop that opens only at the first frost and closes when the snowdrops bloom. Within Papa Jack’s Emporium, paper trees shed their leaves, patchwork dogs breathe and bark, and toy soldiers wage wars of their own.
Into this sanctuary comes Cathy, a young woman hiding from scandal, who becomes entangled in the rivalry between the toymaker’s two sons. Dinsdale writes with the cozy darkness of a Grimm tale, reminding us that even magical places cannot escape the shadows of the wider world. The First World War looms, and no amount of wonder can hold it at bay.
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Not all circuses deal in supernatural magic—some conjure wonder through sawdust and sequins, elephant trumpets and death-defying feats. When young Jacob Jankowski, newly orphaned and adrift, leaps onto a passing train, he tumbles into the struggling Benzini Brothers circus during the Great Depression.
There he finds Marlena, the beautiful equestrian, trapped in marriage to a charming but dangerous man, and Rosie, an elephant everyone believes untrainable. Gruen captures the grit and glamour of circus life with unflinching honesty, proving that ordinary magic—the kind made of courage and love—can be just as intoxicating.
The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
Alice Proserpine has spent her life running from bad luck that seems to follow her and her mother like a loyal hound. Then her reclusive grandmother dies, leaving behind a hidden estate and a cult-classic book of dark fairy tales—and suddenly Alice’s mother is stolen away by a figure from that very book.
The message left behind is simple: Stay away from the Hazel Wood. Naturally, Alice goes anyway. Albert crafts fairy tales with teeth, stories that trap their characters in endless loops of fate. To read this is to remember that wonder can cut as easily as it enchants.
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
In the city of Ketterdam, where anything can be bought and everyone has secrets, a young criminal mastermind assembles an impossible crew for an impossible heist. Kaz Brekker, the boy who cannot be broken, gathers thieves and spies, soldiers and sorcerers.
Their target: the impenetrable Ice Court. Their prize: a scientist whose invention could change the world. Bardugo writes with the precision of a lockpick, each character rendered in shades of grey that somehow make them shine brighter. This is fantasy as caper, as found family, as proof that the most beautiful things often emerge from the darkest places.
Finding Your Next Enchantment
Each of these books offers a different doorway to wonder. Some shimmer with historical elegance; others crackle with darker magic. Some will make you weep for what is lost; others will leave you breathless with possibility.
The spell that Erin Morgenstern cast with her midnight circus was never truly about the tents or the performers. It was about longing—that ache we’ve all felt for something just beyond reach, something more luminous than ordinary life allows.
So choose your next adventure, dear reader. The tents may have vanished, but the magic—ah, the magic is everywhere, waiting for those who know how to look.
