Piranesi
A gentle, meticulous man called Piranesi lives alone in a vast House of infinite, statue-lined halls flooded twice a day by the tide, keeping careful journals of each room, each bird, and each skeleton he finds. The only other living person he meets is the Other, who visits twice a week to discuss a Great and Secret Knowledge they are jointly searching for, and slowly Piranesi's notebooks begin to show entries in his handwriting that he does not remember. Susanna Clarke's slim second novel is both a quiet fantasy about a labyrinth and a haunting detective story about what was done to the man who cannot remember his own name.
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What you might want to know about Piranesi
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Piranesi keeps careful journals about the House, an enormous building of halls and statues whose lower floors flood with the sea. He is one of only two people there. The other one calls him Piranesi.
Yes. Piranesi won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and appeared on numerous best-of-2020 lists from major publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Time.
Piranesi draws on classical and labyrinth imagery rather than retelling a specific myth. The statues, fauns, and Minotaur references evoke Greco-Roman antiquity, and the title nods to the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose etchings of imaginary prisons inspired the novel's setting.
Piranesi is approachable in style but unconventional in structure. It is written as a journal, with capitalized common nouns and a narrator whose understanding of his world is limited. Most readers find the prose clear, though the puzzle-box plot rewards patient attention.
Piranesi was written by Susanna Clarke, published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Piranesi is 273 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Piranesi takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Piranesi is a standalone novel by Susanna Clarke, not part of a series.
Piranesi is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
