It is a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling, at once a gripping mystery, an adventure through a brilliant new fantasy world, and a deep meditation on the human condition: feeling lost, and being found.
To read Piranesi is to be the labyrinth and the traveller in the labyrinth, which is poetry and prose ― Observer Piranesi astonished me. Rowan Williams ― New Statesman A novel to revisit - a house you can open again, with statues touched by quiet thoughts and strange tides. There is at the heart of her writing a rare capacity for the immediate: the stripped, wide-eyed descriptive simplicity of someone who, like her Piranesi, has gone through some sort of barrier and brought back news. The cliché that this book is hard to put down is for once true I can think of few recent books that keep the reader so passionately hungry to know what happens next and to understand the hints and guesses that appear in greater and greater profusion. Clarke has the same skill Flann O'Brien poured into The Third Policeman for making insane worlds feel as solid as our own ― Sunday Times A dazzling fable about loneliness, imagination and memory ― Spectatorīeautiful and bewitchingly strange ― Mail on Sunday This is a novel of exceptional beauty.
Full of wonders and an infectious ecstasy. Piranesi's naively observant voice also nods to the narrators of those Enlightenment parables of flawed Reason lost amid marvels and monsters - think Defoe's Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver, Voltaire's Candide ― The Arts Desk Close to perfect. Genuinely moving climax that throws open the doors of the halls in more ways than one ― i paper Her prowess as a stylist is undiminished. Blending elements of mythology and fantasy, with nods along the way to CS Lewis and Tolkien. The 'House' - its upper rooms lost in clouds, its lower chambers drowned by the sea - will haunt my dreams ― Daily Mail The most curious confection. Utterly otherworldly ― Guardian A gently comic, thoroughly beguiling read. Brilliantly singular ― Sunday Timesīrilliantly peculiar. It burrows into the subconscious, throwing out puzzles long after the final page. A fever dream - disorientating, engrossing, persistently strange.
A remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention ― Guardian Piranesi is a tenebrous study in solitude.
Clarke affirmed herself as one of Britain's most singular novelists ― Daily Telegraph, Best Novels of 2020 Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke made the very notion of genre seem quaint. It's a dream of a novel - Anthony Doerr ― Observer, Books of the Year Clarke's fantastical parable of solitude, imagination, ambition and contentment is a spectacular piece of fiction, and the perfect reading accompaniment to a year like no other ― Guardian, Best Fiction of 2020 A startling novel of austere magical realism. Reminds us of fiction's power to take us to another world and expand our understanding of this one ― Guardian, Autumn highlights I could have lived in the first hundred pages of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke forever. Fully imagined and richly evoked' TELEGRAPH This book is a treasure, washed up upon a forgotten shore, waiting to be discovered' ERIN MORGENSTERN 'Head-spinning. It is a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling' MADELINE MILLER 'Brilliantly singular' SUNDAY TIMES 'A gorgeous, spellbinding mystery. Utterly otherworldly' GUARDIAN 'Piranesi astonished me. Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle-box' DAVID MITCHELL 'It subverts expectations throughout. _ 'What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims? Lost texts must be found secrets must be uncovered. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A SUNDAY TIMES & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' NEW YORK MAGAZINE _ Piranesi lives in the House.