I’ll also admit there were times when the story could have got away from me. Piranesi writes in his notebooks, using a time of his own making, which can take some getting used to. He makes sure they have offerings and moves them when the waters threaten to wash them away. He has skeletons, found on his forays inside the house. He seems happy in his job, tracking the tides of the house, discovering vestibules and hallways and reporting back to The Other in their weekly meetings. There are references to other books for example that I know will have passed me by, though the more obvious ones did greet me as I turned the pages.Īs the story progresses, the reader begins to get a clearer picture of Piranesi and the origins of his life in the House. There are hidden clues, deeper meanings and more aspects to Piranesi’s world to be discovered on a further read of the book. Even as I raced through the book, so keen was I to find out what would become of Piranesi and his home, I knew that this was a book that would benefit more than one reading. There is a subtleness to the story that the reader slowly becomes aware of. The words wash over the reader much like the great waters flood the halls of Piranesi’s House. It is hard sometimes to remember that the world created is all the figment of the author’s imagination, so drawn in is the reader into Piranesi’s life and the hallowed halls of the House. Piranesi is an astounding book, and I don’t use that word lightly. I haven’t read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell so I can’t compare the two. Susanna Clarke will already be familiar with many people, her novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell being hugely popular with many readers over the years. It seems that the House is finally ready to tell Piranesi its secrets. But someone else has entered the hallowed walkways of the House, messages have been left in rocks and on doorways. There are statues scattered throughout and nests of birds high in its rafters. It is a house of hallways and a house of tides. 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. For readers of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.Piranesi lives in the House. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But Piranesi is not afraid he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction World Fantasy Awards Finalist From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.
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