This superbly told tale is sure to be recognized as one of the year's most inventive novels. With great subtlety, Clarke gradually elaborates an explanatory backstory to her tale's events and reveals sinister occult machinations that build to a crescendo of genuine horror. Heather Hyde Minor Piranesi loved to make ancient Rome look grandiose and overpowering, Minor said. In their discussions about 16, it becomes increasingly clear the Other is gaslighting Piranesi about his memory, their relationship, and the reality they share. The research, recuperative in method, serves as a biography of Piranesi’s books, bringing text and image together to reveal a learned mind alive with biting wit and unflinching big-picture questions. After the Other worriedly asks Piranesi if he's seen in the house a person they refer to as 16, Piranesi's curiosity is piqued, and all the more so after the Other instructs him to hide. Meanwhile, the Other is pursuing the 'Great and Secret Knowledge' of the ancients. So immense is the House that its many parts support their own internal climates, all of which Piranesi vividly describes ('I squeezed myself into the Woman's Niche and waited until I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen'). The story unfolds as journal entries written by the eponymous narrator, who, along with an enigmatic master known as the Other (and 13 skeletons whom Piranesi regards as persons) inhabits the House, a vast, labyrinthine structure of statue-adorned halls and vestibules. 'Head-spinning … Fully imagined and richly evoked' TELEGRAPHĬlarke wraps a twisty mystery inside a metaphysical fantasy in her extraordinary new novel, her first since 2004's Jonathan Strange & Mr. 'A gorgeous, spellbinding mystery … This book is a treasure, washed up upon a forgotten shore, waiting to be discovered' ERIN MORGENSTERN It is a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling' MADELINE MILLER 'It subverts expectations throughout … Utterly otherworldly' GUARDIAN 'What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being … Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle-box' DAVID MITCHELL The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous.

Lost texts must be found secrets must be uncovered. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims? 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. The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' (NEW YORK MAGAZINE) WINNER OF THE 2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONĪ Sunday Times & New York Times bestseller

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