Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor (narrator)
🏆 Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
Recommendations from our site
“Piranesi is Susanna Clarke’s very-long-awaited second novel following, obviously, the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. This is by far the tightest and most contained narrative of all the books I’m talking about today. It’s the smallest book in terms of page count, a tiny little book, but it’s also the largest in terms of its imaginative space. We open with the character Piranesi – rather, a character who has been given the name Piranesi – in this other-worldly space that he calls the House. The House is his whole world, and it’s rapidly obvious that it is some kind of higher order symbolic world, the platonic world of higher forms, which appears as a giant, damaged and deserted house, of apparently infinite size. It has endless halls and rooms lined with statues that seem to have deep symbolic meaning. The upper level of the House has clouds and birds; the lower levels have an ocean, and there are dangerous tides. Piranesi is the only living inhabitant of the House. There are bones and remains that indicate previous inhabitants, now dead. His only human contact is with a man he calls the Other. The Other shows up and visits the House at intervals from somewhere else. And Piranesi doesn’t remember anything other than the House, so at first we don’t know who he is, or where he came from. As far as he’s concerned, he’s always been there.” Read more...
Vajra Chandrasekera, Novelist
“Everyone loves Piranesi… It’s the story of a man who has no memories and no sense of time. He’s been named Piranesi by the only other occupant of the enormous palatial space that he finds himself in, which doesn’t really have the constraints of a physical place…This novel does that masterful, difficult thing of hooking you straight away, at first with nothing but pure intrigue, and then with this momentum of yearning and wonder and anguish all the way through. It’s a small, elegant mystery. There’s something extremely punk rock about releasing a tiny book. Piranesi is not technically a novella, but you could read it in a day or two. I just love that.” Read more...
Arianna Reiche, Novelist
“I really think of Piranesi as a fantasy book because it’s about this man who’s living in a maze. He is talking to statues and interacting with them and he has someone that comes and visits him once or twice a week. He’s also on a journey of self-discovery…It just really makes you sit and listen. It’s a seven-hour book, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, because I was trying to figure out what was going on, to peel back the layers of the onion, and work out the maze. It really sucked me in.” Read more...
The Best Audiobooks: the 2021 Audie Awards
Michele Cobb, Publisher
“Set in a fantastical other world, which runs parallel to our own, we find its protagonist wandering an infinite series of ruined halls through which wind rushes, clouds condense and seawater washes. Truly rather wondrous, and the product of a brilliant mind.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
