Piranesi
A man who lives in an infinite house of statues and tides and calls it home. Nothing prepares you for what this book actually is.
The House
Susanna Clarke's 2020 novel is narrated by a gentle man who calls himself Piranesi and lives alone in an impossible labyrinthine house where the lower halls flood with tides and statues fill every room. He keeps meticulous journals, knows only two other people, and is entirely content. When messages begin appearing warning him that someone dangerous has entered the house, the reality he has accepted begins to fracture. The novel won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. Clarke spent ten years writing it while recovering from a chronic illness that left her unable to work for long stretches.
Reading Piranesi
Atmosphere
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Journal
"The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
"Susanna Clarke · Piranesi
Clarke's debut novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell took her ten years to write and became a bestseller in 2004. She then developed severe chronic fatigue syndrome and spent years barely able to read. Piranesi is the book she wrote during that recovery.
The character name Piranesi comes from the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, famous for his hallucinatory etchings of impossibly complex imaginary prisons called the Carceri.