Feels less like reading a book than moving into one.
Piranesi
A solitary man explores an endless House of marble halls, statues, and tidal seas, unaware of the mystery surrounding his existence.
181g
Weighs the same as Battery Pack
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fantasy
Susanna Clarke published Piranesi in 2020, sixteen years and a long illness after her giant first novel, and nobody expected this. Piranesi lives in the House: an endless labyrinth of marble halls, crashing tides, drifting clouds, and thousands of statues. He spends his days mapping its rooms, keeping meticulous journals, and tending the bones of the dead until another story begins to emerge. Clarke lets wonder accumulate almost unnoticed until it becomes overwhelming. It feels less like reading a book than moving into one.
Field notes
The novel takes its name from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose eighteenth-century engravings of imaginary prisons depict vast, impossible architectures of staircases and vaulted halls. But Clarke's deeper inspiration came from Owen Barfield, a philosopher associated with C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, who believed ancient peoples experienced the world as a living, sacred reality rather than something separate from themselves. He called this "original participation." Clarke wanted her narrator to inhabit precisely that relationship with his surroundings. What looks like a prison to one person becomes an inexhaustible source of wonder to another. Clarke's house is as much experiment in belonging as a labyrinth.