"A man lives alone in a world consisting of vast, labyrinthine marble halls filled with statues, where the sea floods the lower levels and clouds fog the upper levels. Knowing nothing else, he spends his days exploring this world, appreciating its beauty, and documenting what he finds in his journals, until information from somewhere outside this world encroaches.
Piranesi is tranquil and odd and familiar-- not like a book you've read before, but like something you maybe dreamed of one time and you thought it was real. It feels plausible, like you've heard about it before."
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date 2020-09-15
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / Science Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781635575637
From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.
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. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
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 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.
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.
