Piranesi

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 30,456 ratings

Price: 15.26

Last update: 08-27-2024


About this item

Bloomsbury presents Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, read by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Winner of the 2021 Audie Awards Audiobook of the Year.

Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Shortlisted for The Costa Novel of The Year Award.

A Sunday Times and New York Times best seller.

Chosen as A Book of The Year by the Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, I Paper, New Statesman, Spectator, Time Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, BBC Culture, Netgalley and the Church Times.

The spectacular new audiobook from the best-selling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, ‘one of our greatest living authors,’ New York Magazine.

Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.

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. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.

Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims?

Lost texts must be found, secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous.

The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its kindness infinite.


Top reviews from the United States

Rennie Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars Strange. Unique. Otherwordly. Captivating.
Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2020
Firstly, this is a "strange" story. How strange? Hmm. Consider if H.P. Lovecraft had an imagination of massive goodness and gentleness to partner with his skill at grandeur. That strange. Or, if the lyrics to A Whiter Shade of Pale" were expanded into a cohesive, novel-length, narrative. That analogy too might work. Consider your own appetite for "strange" before you jump in to buy and begin. This story became truly entrancing for me.

A young man, Piranesi, (though that is not the name on his birth certificate, but a name given to him by the Other) lives in the House, a vast labyrinth of halls and corridors and staircases, filled with exquisite marble statues. Piranesi leads a simple life; he fishes, dries seaweed for soup and fuel, maps and memorizes the tides that at times course through the House, walks the halls in reverence, and keeps a journal, according to his own calendar, of what he observes and feels and comes to know. Twice a week, for one hour only, he has an appointment with the man known as the Other. The Other is always dressed smartly in suits and a tie. Piranesi is dressed in the rags that remain of the clothes he must have worn when he arrived at the House. Piranesi dresses his hair with seashells and seaweed. Piranesi does not know where the Other comes from or goes to outside these two weekly appointments, but believes, at least in the beginning, the Other to also live in the House.

Piranesi respects the Other but is also wary of him. For the Other warns that Piranesi will go mad or be in other dangers if he does not do what the Other wants. Piranesi researches, his memories and his journals and his thoughts, and reflects that maybe it is the Other who is mad, and not he.

And so ... this simple life carries on ... until there are messages left for Piranesi from an intruder, and signs of an intruder's presence. The Other warns the young man that the new presence is a mortal danger to him.

Susanna Clarke's storytelling language is stately, grand, as befitting the realm in which the story takes place. She uses a language full of descriptions of statues minutely observed, loved and adored. Piranesi speaks the same language, reverence at being in the presence of the magnificence of the House. The story unfolds. There is action. Twists and turns. Then dangers. But, who is the dangerous one for Piranesi; the Other, or, the intruder?

Returning to strangeness for a moment. By the end of the first few pages I was both bored and irritated. Thirty or forty pages further on I was captivated. This is NOT a "pulse-pounding page turner"! In fact, it is difficult even to ascribe a genre to it. Then, I reached a point I turned the pages as fast as I could (kindle "pages"). Hah! It is so refreshing to read something so different and that is so exquisitely plotted out and well written. And at the very last, after the final paragraph (which is resonant and glorious), I felt loss; for there is no more of this wonderful story to read.
JGP821
4.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read, but not in any way like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2020
Piranesi (although he suspects that is not his name) lives alone in a house so huge that it contains an ocean on its lower floors, and lakes in some of its ruined halls. The tides rush up its staircases, drowning the thousands of statues that line the walls. Piranesi lives by fishing in the lakes or the ocean, and cooks on fires made from dried seaweed. He keeps meticulous journals, which help him work out the times when two or more tides will combine and threaten to flood the level where he lives. Twice a week, a man whom Piranesi knows only as “the Other” visits. He occasionally brings Piranesi useful items: shoes, fishnets, cooking utensils, and has enlisted Piranesi in his search for “the Great and Secret Knowledge” – a method for becoming immortal, reading minds, and moving objects by telekinesis.

One day, Piranesi finds words written in chalk on some of the walls and doorways of the house, giving directions to a particular room. On a later night, he sees the glow of a flashlight being used to explore some of the halls, and finds an unknown person has written a message in chalk on the floor. Although the Other has warned Piranesi that any person who comes to the house will try to harm Piranesi, he nevertheless writes a reply to the message.

Prompted by the messages which he exchanges with the unknown person, Piranesi discovers that he has completely forgotten large portions of the events described in his journals. He begins re-reading early volumes to recover his memory of the events described. Gradually, with the help of the journals, and from messages exchanged with the unknown person, Piranesi discovers that Laurence Arne-Sayles, an English anthropologist and academic, had a theory that ancient man could communicate with natural forces in the world, and gain assistance from those forces. Several of Arne-Sayles’ students formed something like a cult around his theories. But then some of the students disappeared, and Arne-Sayles was convicted of kidnapping one student, who was found imprisoned behind a false wall in his house. His academic career ended with his conviction, although some of his remaining students continued to pursue his theories.

Ultimately, Piranesi realizes that he himself was a newspaper reporter, researching a biography of Arne-Sayles. When he went to interview one of Arne-Sayles former students, now himself an academic, the former student transported Piranesi to the house where he now lives. Something in the nature of the house causes amnesia, and subsequent to his arrival in the house, Piranesi forgot his prior life.

The unknown person who has been leaving chalk messages is revealed to be Sarah Raphael, a police officer investigating the disappearances of Arne-Sayles’ students. With her aid, Piranesi recovers his memory, and returns to the real world – although he still occasionally visits the house, which he finds peaceful and calming.

Readers hoping for a return to the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or of The Ladies of Grace Adieu, will be disappointed by Piranesi, which is not in any way like Clarke’s earlier books. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a historical adventure novel, a love story, and a story of magic, all rolled into one. The book succeeds, in part, because it grafts a detailed magical history – peopled with uniquely drawn characters and going back to the Middle Ages -- onto the England of the Napoleonic wars. The appearance and use of magic in early 1800s England is shown not as some uncanny aberration, but as a continuation of that history. By contrast, Piranesi is not a historical novel, not a romance, and contains no magic – except for the ability to pass into the huge house described in the book, which seems to exist in an alternate dimension.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell involved dozens of characters, each individually drawn, all interacting in a complicated plot extending over years and across much of Europe. It was complex, multi-faceted, and intricate. Piranesi has only four speaking characters, and the story – which extends over only nine months -- has none of the interwoven complexity of Clarke’s first book.

Piranesi is a brilliant novel, but it is not set in the fictional universe that Clarke usually inhabits. It is almost as if George R. R. Martin gave us a hard-boiled detective story set in 1930s Los Angeles. It’s always a shock when one of your favorite authors changes her oeuvre, but the shock won’t delay me a minute in buying the next thing that Clarke writes.

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