The long-awaited return from the author of the multi-million copy bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke's debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was first published in more than 34 countries and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of short stories, some set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. Piranesi was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, the Hugo Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Susanna Clarke lives in Derbyshire.
Reminds us of fiction’s power to take us to another world and
expand our understanding of this one
*Guardian, Autumn highlights*
It has a daring and a grace that are quietly, transportingly
spectacular. If you were looking for a book that distils the
concept of wonder, this is the one: it feels like a work of pure
generosity
*GUARDIAN, Best summer books*
It’s always great to have some fiction to heartily recommend, and
while there’s been stiff competition this year, Piranesi by Susanna
Clarke has won out in the end. A masterful work of weird fiction,
it’s a novel that grips, perplexes and moves you, usually all at
once!
*Observer, The Best Books of 2020*
The fiction, nonfiction and poetry that deepened our understanding,
ignited our curiosity and helped us escape … For fantasy readers
often eager to get lost in mystical worlds and escape the
complications of real life, Piranesi’s predicament deeply
resonates
*Time, Books of the Year*
The long-anticipated second novel from the author of 2004’s
best-seller Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a philosophical
fantasy. Piranesi (the name is one of several allusions to the 18th
century) spends his days interpreting coded messages left around a
labyrinthine villa filled with seabirds and symbolic statues
*Financial Times, Books of the Year*
Susanna Clarke’s new novel is a beguiling study of isolation and
exile ... To say more would be to ruin one of the year’s more
unusual reading experiences
*i paper, Books of the Year 2020*
This tale of weird enchanted halls is close to perfect
*The Times, Books of the Year*
A warm book about losing and finding oneself; about what humanity
could have lost in the process of becoming rational
*BBC.com*
Purely joyful reading … a delight - as if Borges wrote a novel with
a beginning, middle and satisfying end
*Spectator, Books of the Year*
My absolute favourite book of the year by miles ... it took root in
me
*Spectator, Books of the Year*
Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke made the very notion of genre seem
quaint ... Piranesi is a tenebrous study in solitude … A remarkable
feat, not just of craft but of reinvention
*Guardian*
Susanna Clarke's first novel since 2004's Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell was more than worth the sixteen-year wait. Full of the
magic and mayhem you might expect, Piranesi introduces a labyrinth
to savour
*NetGalley UK’s Top Ten Books of 2020*
Susanna Clarke's long-awaited Piranesi is utterly compelling –
bewildering, intense, moving, shocking, combining a haunting
fantasy with sharp insights about a culture of domination,
hierarchy and rivalry and about how the imagination can survive in
such a world
*New Statesman Books of the Year*
Like a thriller … Compelling … A fever dream - disorientating,
engrossing, persistently strange … It burrows into the
subconscious, throwing out puzzles long after the final page …
Brilliantly singular
*Sunday Times*
Exhilarating and hallucinatory, a mystery told backwards and
inside-out. How she does it I've no idea; it's as though most minds
are cameras, but Clarke's is a kaleidoscope
*New Statesman, Books of the Year*
Brilliantly peculiar … It subverts expectations throughout …
Utterly otherworldly
*Guardian*
The publication of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi confirms her status as
one of the greatest and most interesting writers of fantasy in the
past hundred years or more
*Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year*
A gently comic, thoroughly beguiling read … The ‘House’ - its upper
rooms lost in clouds, its lower chambers drowned by the sea - will
haunt my dreams
*Daily Mail*
The most curious confection … Blending elements of mythology and
fantasy, with nods along the way to CS Lewis and Tolkien …
Genuinely moving climax that throws open the doors of the halls in
more ways than one
*i paper*
Her prowess as a stylist is undiminished … 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*
Close to perfect ... Full of wonders and an infectious ecstasy ...
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*
A dazzling fable about loneliness, imagination and memory
*Spectator*
Beautiful and bewitchingly strange
*Mail on Sunday*
This is a novel of exceptional beauty ... The cliché 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 ... There is at the heart of her
writing a rare capacity for the immediate: the stripped, wide-eyed
descriptive simplicity of someone who, like her Piranesi, has gone
through some sort of barrier and brought back news.
*New Statesman*
A novel to revisit - a house you can open again, with statues
touched by quiet thoughts and strange tides ... To read Piranesi is
to be the labyrinth and the traveller in the labyrinth, which is
poetry and prose
*Observer*
Piranesi astonished me. It is a miraculous and luminous feat of
storytelling, at once a gripping mystery, an adventure through a
brilliant new fantasy world, and a deep meditation on the human
condition: feeling lost, and being found. I already want to be back
in its haunting and beautiful halls!
*MADELINE MILLER*
A book that’s deliciously weird but meticulously constructed to
achieve maximum suspense. Susanna Clarke doesn’t just write about
magic; she channels it on to the page
*Sunday Express*
Enthralling and transcendent ... Clarke's writing is clear, sharp -
she can cleave your heart in a few short words ... The mystery of
Piranesi unwinds at a tantalizing yet lightning-like pace - it's
hard not to rush ahead, even when each sentence, each revelation
makes you want to linger
*NPR*
Plunges deep into those forbidden fortresses from which the un-mad
and mortal among us are forever barred ... The only possible
conclusion is: Clarke is writing from experience ... With great
effort, Clarke has un-unpicked her personality and returned to this
world, our Earth, so that the rest of us might know her exquisite
burden. Welcome back, Fairy Mistress, if only for a spell! We are
grateful to you, oh yes, but we mourn you a little, too—that you
must work so hard to be human.”
*Wired*
Utterly brain-mangling … A creepy, expertly managed crime story
*Metro*
Close to perfect ... As a work of fiction, it’s spectacular; an
irresistibly unspooling mystery set in a world of original
strangeness, revealing a set of ideas that will stay lodged in your
head long after you’ve finished reading
*The Times*
Why don’t you trip on the new Susanna Clarke book if you want to
get your mind bent but don’t much care for drugs?
*New York Magazine*
A high-quality page-turner - even the most leisurely reader will
probably finish it off in a day - but its chief pleasure is
immersion in its strange and uncannily attractive setting ... A
standout feat
*Wall Street Journal*
Could Piranesi match the hype? I’m delighted to say it has, with
Clarke’s singular wit and imagination still intact in a far more
compressed yet still captivating tale you’ll want to delve into
again right after you read its sublime last sentence
*Boston Globe*
A short and beautiful novel that reads like a poem ... in its
cumulative effect of expressing an emotion and state of being that
is inexpressible. It’s a strange and lovely read
*Buzzfeed*
In terms of invention and beauty, it’s a fitting heir to Clarke’s
first book … Clarke deftly weaves together highbrow and lowbrow so
Piranesi as reader is both symbol and story. To read Piranesi is to
be the labyrinth and the traveler in the labyrinth, which is poetry
and prose … The end of the novel doesn’t exactly provide justice,
and closure is only provisional. Piranesi is a gentle man, and a
gentle book. It wants to leave doors open for its characters and
its readers … Piranesi is a novel to revisit - a house you can open
again, with statues touched by quiet thoughts and strange tides
*Observer*
What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being, what a
tick-tock-tick-tock of reveals, what a pure protagonist, what a
morally squalid supporting cast, what beauty, tension and
restraint, and what a pitch-perfect ending. Piranesi is an
exquisite puzzle-box far, far bigger on the inside than it is on
the outside
*DAVID MITCHELL*
A wonder
*Slate.com*
Susanna Clarke has fashioned her own myth anew and enlarged the
world again
*New Republic*
Piranesi is a gorgeous, spellbinding mystery that gently unravels
page by page. Precisely the sort of book that I love wordlessly
handing to someone so they can have the pleasure of uncovering its
secrets for themselves. This book is a treasure, washed up upon a
forgotten shore, waiting to be discovered
*ERIN MORGENSTERN*
Okay, now everyone listen. No, I mean it, shut up for a second. We
need to talk about Piranesi. I don’t… I really do not know how to
talk about this book beyond a very high pitched scream and an
emphatic grabbing of your knee
*Tor.com*
As gloriously imaginative as its predecessor … A novel that could
have been written by nobody else … Her prose is crisp, direct and
unfussy … It’s a book about the tension between those who want to
possess a world and those who delight in it, describe it, honour
it. It’s an extraordinary book, well worth the wait
*SFX Magazine*
Fifteen years on from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke’s
second novel finally sees the light
*Sunday Times, What to watch out for next year 2020*
Susannah Clarke’s monumental masterwork Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell was one of the finest works of speculative fiction of the
twenty-first century and now, with Piranesi, she once more mines a
darkly fantastical vision with a tale of a very singular house and
its mysterious inhabitants. Saturated in gothic atmosphere and
supernatural lore, Piranesi is simply unmissable
*Waterstones.com*
Here is Clarke’s talent in full flower; Piranesi is the most purely
enjoyable novel I’ve read in a long while
*Literary Review*
A magical house with labyrinthine halls and tides that thunder up
staircases
*The Times, Autumn highlights*
Delightful, discombobulating … Piranesi is detective of his own
existence ... Gripping
*Psychologies*
It’s 16 years since Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – now Clarke is
back with a new otherworldly fantasy
*Guardian, 2020 in books: a literary calendar*
Sixteen long years have passed since the publication of the
magnificent Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clarke returns
at last in September with Piranesi … The eerie tale of a man who
lives in a flooded house
*Daily Express*
The long-awaited new book from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell
*Observer*
Susannah Clarke’s much-anticipated follow-up finally arrives
*SFX Magazine*
Sixteen years after Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, Susannah
Clarke returns at last with the otherworldly tale of a man who
lives in a flooded house
*Daily Mirror*
I wish I could read this again for the first time. Its atmosphere
of beautiful, sad loneliness is the perfect lockdown companion.
There are so many things to note about the book, but here is just
one: Piranesi looks with loving attention at the world in which he
finds himself, caring for everything that he encounters, and
receiving everything as a loving gift. Other forces, however, see
it very differently. The book is deeply satisfying, with a depth of
sadness – or is it joy?
*Church Times, Books of the Year 2020*
PRAISE FOR JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL: Unquestionably the
finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy
years. It’s funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and
magical ... Closing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after 800 pages
my only regret was that it wasn’t twice the length
*NEIL GAIMAN*
This is, in both the precise and the colloquial sense, a fabulous
book ... a highly original and compelling work
*SUNDAY TIMES*
To be honest, my topic for a gathering, my page-turner, my
mind-improver, my talking point and my train-reading are all one
and the same book: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell…I am literally
unable to put it down
*TATLER*
Full of spells, bad weather, statues that talk, haunted ballrooms
and sinister gentlemen with thistledown hair ... be enchanted!
*ELLE*
The language of the book is such a pleasure you’d probably want to
go and read it anyway
*LAUREN LAVERNE, BBC 6 MUSIC*
A literary event
*Daily Telegraph, Autumn highlights*
A sublime exploration of loss, isolation, and the power of the
imagination
*New York Magazine, Autumn picks*
Infinitely clever ... None of Clarke’s enchantment has worn off -
it’s evolved ... to abide in these pages is to find oneself happily
detained in awe
*Washington Post*
Wondrous and moving ... Empathy opens new horizons in Susanna
Clarke’s glorious new novel about occultists, lost ages, and the
power of belief
*Los Angeles Times*
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
