The cliche that this book is hard to put down is for once true I can think of few recent books that keep the reader so passionately hungry to know what happens next and to understand the hints and guesses that appear in greater and greater profusion. 'Beautiful and bewitchingly strange.' - Mail on Sunday 'A dazzling fable about loneliness, imagination and memory.' - The Spectator Clarke has the same skill Flann O'Brien poured into The Third Policeman for making insane worlds feel as solid as our own.' - Sunday Times Full of wonders and an infectious ecstasy. Piranesi's naively observant voice also nods to the narrators of those Enlightenment parables of flawed Reason lost amid marvels and monsters - think Defoe's Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver, Voltaire's Candide.' - The Arts Desk 'Her prowess as a stylist is undiminished. Genuinely moving climax that throws open the doors of the halls in more ways than one.' - i paper Blending elements of mythology and fantasy, with nods along the way to CS Lewis and Tolkien. The 'House' - its upper rooms lost in clouds, its lower chambers drowned by the sea - will haunt my dreams.' - Daily Mail 'A gently comic, thoroughly beguiling read. It burrows into the subconscious, throwing out puzzles long after the final page. A fever dream - disorientating, engrossing, persistently strange. A remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention.' - The Guardian Piranesi is a tenebrous study in solitude. 'Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke made the very notion of genre seem quaint. Clarke affirmed herself as one of Britain's most singular novelists.' - Daily Telegraph, Best Novels of 2020 'A startling novel of austere magical realism. 'Clarke's fantastical parable of solitude, imagination, ambition and contentment is a spectacular piece of fiction, and the perfect reading accompaniment to a year like no other.' - The Guardian, Best Fiction of 2020 'Reminds us of fiction's power to take us to another world and expand our understanding of this one.' - The Guardian, Autumn highlights Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ISBN: 9781526622433 Number of pages: 272 Weight: 190 g Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm MEDIA REVIEWS The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite. 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 and waterlilies 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 which thunder up staircases, the clouds which move in slow procession through the upper halls. Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2020 The hedge maze is more or less what you’d expect, rather dusty in summer and worn from all the people’s feet but the space in which it stands, a great sunken rectangle surrounded by tall trees is very like an impossibly large, sunlit hall.Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 Its ancient robots faithfully tend the birds and the trees and plants in a very Piranesi sort of way.Ĥ. This isn’t strictly speaking a labyrinth, it’s an intricate and surreal combination of trees and architecture – and it’s also in the sky. Laputa: The Castle in the Sky is a Studio Ghibli film by Hayao Miyazaki. The House of Asterion, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges contains a labyrinth very closely related to the one in Piranesi. Like Piranesi, she faithfully follows rituals, but unlike Piranesi her gods prove false in the end.Ģ. Like Piranesi, there is a question over her real name. Like Piranesi, Arha prides herself on her skill in negotiating the labyrinth’s paths. Once inside she is allowed to light a lamp or a torch. The protagonist, Arha, must enter the labyrinth in total darkness. It’s not a pleasant place, but it is fascinating (plus there’s a map, so you can walk around it by yourself if you like). It’s one of her Earthsea books and contains an underground labyrinth. We caught up with Susanna Clarke to ask her about her favourite mazes and how they inspired Piranesi.ġ. Susanna Clarke is the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with her novel Piranesi, a gothic tale of a very singular, labyrinthine house and its mysterious inhabitants.
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