The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Reves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire. Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the reveurs - the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter's daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer's apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love...A fabulous, fin-de-siecle feast for the senses and a life-affirming love story, The Night Circus is a captivating novel that will make the real world seem fantastical and a fantasy world real.

I liked this book. It's imaginative and fantastical. But I didn't read it fast enough ... that might sound weird but most good books benefit from regular reading and from reading more than one or two pages at a time for you to become properly entranced by them. I didn't give this that time till the last few days, so I do feel like I missed out on some of it's effect. The other thing I struggled with in this book (but not prohibitively) was that it's out of sequence. But the sequence wasn't really made clear enough for me until the end when they reference an event in the last chapter that happened a year before. Sure, they print the date in a tiny font at the start of each chapter, but I never really pay much attention to the chapter headings (books so rarely have them anyway), so although I was aware that they were dated, I missed that they weren't sequential completely. I'm not sure why they weren't, it seemed a bit like a wasted writing-tool. But other than those minor things, this is definitely worth a read :)