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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
This was a hot release in 2012, it won a bunch of awards, and like The Reluctant Coroner, it was a debut novel that started life as a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. A beautiful story, lushly told—I wanted to go to this circus so badly when I was reading it. Part mystery, part adventure, part fantasy, this book is powerful and emotional. I heard others say the characters were poorly developed, but the circus itself is a character—and it showed me a lot of surprising things I hadn't seen in novels before. It's a fantastic, engrossing read—one of those books where you're disappointed you've only got 20 pages left.
