Erin Morgenstern, best-selling author of The Night Circus, published The Starless Sea in 2019. This work of magical realism interweaves separate stories with shared plots, themes, and characters. The book addresses ideas such as the concept of story, its meaning, and the nature of beginnings and endings, along with fate, free will, and what it means to become part of a narrative. This guide references the Knopf Doubleday first edition.

Plot Summary

Zachary Ezra Rawlins, an Emerging Media graduate student at a university in Vermont, discovers a book named Sweet Sorrows in the library. He is startled to find a story from his childhood within its pages. The book was donated to his university four years before his story took place. Intrigued, he begins researching the book and its mysterious symbols.

Zachary stumbles across a photo of a woman who wears three necklaces, each with a charm depicting one of the three symbols. He attends a masquerade ball and dances with a woman dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are; this woman, Mirabel, is the same woman from the photo. He also meets a storyteller who spins a tale. After the story ends, Zachary finds a card in his pocket. He goes to the meeting place listed on the card and encounters the storyteller from the ball, who goes by the name Dorian. Dorian asks Zachary to take a book to The Collector’s Club headquarters and exchange it for another book. When Zachary returns with the other book, Dorian says he will take him somewhere.

This somewhere is the Starless Sea, a fantastical realm beneath the Earth from which all stories spring. Some visitors take up residency and study stories to their heart’s content. Others dedicate themselves as acolytes, guardians, or keepers. The Collector’s Club, led by Allegra Cavallo, works to destroy all doors to the Starless Sea—a door like the one Zachary walked away from as a child. Allegra wants to prevent new story seekers from entering, so the current story cycle playing out in the Starless Sea will never reach its end.

Zachary escapes the Collector’s Club and reunites with Dorian. Running for their lives, the two come upon another painted door. While Zachary makes it through to the Harbor of the Starless Sea, the Collector’s Club takes Dorian prisoner, so Mirabel and Zachary work together to rescue Dorian and bring him to the Harbor. Zachary then undertakes a quest given to him by a mysterious book, which charges Zachary with finding a man lost in time. The romantic tension between Zachary and Dorian escalates but is disrupted by a cataclysmic earthquake. They soon learn that the damage to the Harbor was caused by Allegra, who returns to the Harbor and tries to kill Dorian. A fissure opens up in the floor, sending Dorian and Allegra down to the surface of the Starless Sea.

Stories within the Starless Sea take place in in simultaneous yet separate timestreams. They share settings and characters, with the circumstances of one story sometimes changing the physical reality of another. A core story of Time and Fate continues in the form of a love affair between Mirabel, who is both immortal and the current incarnation of Fate (and also the painter of the mysterious entry doors that Allegra has tried to destroy), and the Harbor’s Keeper, who is the incarnation of Time. After Dorian and Mirabel disappear, the Keeper shows Zachary a detailed portrait of himself and Dorian, painted 20 years before by Allegra. Mirabel takes Zachary down to the Starless Sea’s shore to find Dorian—and bring about “the end” that Allegra has tried to prevent.

After his fall into the fissure, Dorian is rescued by Eleanor, who captains a ship on the Starless Sea made of honey. On the boat, Dorian finds Allegra’s dead body. Meanwhile, after being separated from Mirabel, Zachary faces attacks from owls and the darkness, only to be rescued by the man lost in time: Simon. A member of the Keating family who donated Sweet Sorrows to Zachary’s university’s library, Simon has fallen in love with Eleanor, who entered the Starless Sea through the door as a child. The two then conceived a child born out of time: Mirabel.

Simon’s attempt at recording “the story” of the Starless Sea causes Zachary to challenge his preconceptions and his own place in the greater narrative. Able to speak to Dorian yet separated from him by space and time, Zachary gives Dorian a sword. Zachary then finds an ice sculpture of Mirabel who asks Zachary to tell her a story; this story is the fulfillment of Zachary’s test to become a keeper. Separately, Dorian retrieves Fate’s heart, which was removed after her murder, and fights his way to the sea, facing imposters who each take the form of Zachary. When the two finally meet, Dorian accidentally kills the real Zachary with the sword. Zachary finds himself in a strange afterlife within a doll universe that he has seen within the Harbor. The bees who live within it inform him that he is the key to ending and locking up the story. The bees fly away, and the Starless Sea rises, absorbing everything back into itself, including the archived story.

Dorian agonizes over Zachary’s death. As he waits to drown, he is rescued again by Eleanor. As he stares at Zachary’s body, he realizes that he has Fate’s heart in his possession and pushes it into Zachary’s chest. Dorian’s true love comes back to life, and he and Zachary are finally united. After Zachary’s story concludes, another begins, this time with the entrance of Zachary’s friend Kat into another Harbor of the Starless Sea.