Did you ever play those old adventure games, like Zork, where you wander through a maze, mapping it out while discovering strange and wonderful things? Piranesi feels like being in that kind of game. At first it’s just the strangeness and magnitude of the place that grabs your interest. Then there’s another character in the maze, and slowly you discover there’s a story and a mystery to solve.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, was a huge hit. In 2005 it got a Hugo Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a Locus Award. It was an inspiration for my The Magic Battery. Unfortunately, health issues put a dent in a promising career, and her second novel, Piranesi, didn’t come out until 2020. The earlier book was realistic historical fantasy. This one is completely different.

It’s hard to say anything about Piranesi without saying too much. As in an adventure game, the world-building comes to the foreground. The narrator lives in a huge house which is his entire world. It has hundreds of halls and thousands of statues. The staircases seem scaled for giants. The House is so large that it has tides, seasonal snowfall, and a wildlife ecosystem. Yet as far as the narrator knows, it has only two inhabitants. The narrator is as much of a mystery as the house is, even to himself.
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