Piranesi

For a person we know as Piranesi, a House with a capital H is a whole World. “From the start of the World there were certainly fifteen people in it,” and Piranesi is the fifteenth. He explores the endless Halls adorned with majestic Statues and compiles a schedule of Tides that flood the lower floors. Clouds swim up into the upper floors, and birds fly in. On Tuesdays and Fridays, Piranesi meets the Other. “The beauty of the House is unspeakable,” Piranesi writes in his diary. “Its kindness knows no bounds.” But one day, he discovers traces of a sixteenth person…

Sixteen years ago Susanna Clarke released “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell”—a book that took the world by storm with over 4 million copies sold and was acclaimed as a legendary masterpiece: “This is what a novel like ‘Master and Margarita’ might look like if Dickens had written it” (A. Genis); “The best literary fairy tale in English in the last seventy years” (N. Gaiman). And now, at last, we’ve been waiting long enough for Clarke’s second novel. “A literary event of the highest importance” (Daily Telegraph).