Piranesi

Piranesi is a speculative fiction novel by the English author Susanna Clarke, published by Bloomsbury in 2020. It is her second novel, following Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell sixteen years earlier, and it took the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021. The novel is written as a journal kept from inside a seemingly infinite, world-encompassing structure called the House.

The protagonist, who is known only by the nickname Piranesi, lives inside the House, a world of endless halls and vestibules where every one of the countless statues is different. Clouds fill the upper levels, an ocean occupies the lower ones, and the sea surges into the middle level on the tides he tracks meticulously. He believes he is one of only two living people, alongside the man he calls the Other.

The Other asks him for help with research and does not like the questions Piranesi asks. He is content, mostly, until the Other mentions a new person in the House and the journal begins to record things that do not match. From there Piranesi starts sorting what he can verify from what he has been told, and the book is structured as that careful process rather than as an explanation offered in advance.

It is a standalone novel told in short journal entries, with the reader working out the nature of the House at the same pace as the narrator. Clarke writes the whole book in Piranesi's voice, which is unfailingly precise and entirely without the vocabulary he would need to describe what is happening to him.