Piranesi

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 07-19-2025
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 07-07-2025
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 06-28-2025
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 07-03-2025
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 06-04-2025
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 07-17-2025
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Fantasy / Clarke, Susanna	4-week checkout	Due 07-07-2025

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Phenomenal submitted by severian on July 1, 2021, 12:15pm The best book I read during the pandemic (and weirdly suited for it). Clarke doesn’t waste a word— the story is absorbing and masterful. Read it!

I got reeled into the story submitted by mollybshire on March 29, 2022, 12:26pm I found the beginning of the book to be a bit tedious in it's descriptions of the halls and statues and not much else. But I'm glad I stuck with it, I had a hard time putting it down after some of the mysteries of the story began to show up. I very much wanted to know what would happen next! Would recommend.

If you like puzzles you will like this book submitted by himaja2 on June 20, 2022, 3:43pm Like other reviews have mentioned, the beginning can be hard to get through because it's so confusing. Keep at it -- I promise you won't regret it. This book is a revelation.

Strange and Beautiful submitted by AMR on July 5, 2022, 1:28pm If you can stick through the disorientation of the beginning (which I loved), you'll be rewarded with a gloriously odd tale as immersive as any Clarke has created. Such a delightful fantasy/mystery.

Captivating Standalone Fantasy submitted by Meginator on August 1, 2022, 3:15pm I’m really glad that my book club chose this, because I don’t think I would have read it otherwise. A surreal journey through an endless house bounded only vertically by oceans and clouds, the book straddles the lines between fantasy and reality while gently asking big questions about the nature of reality and the power of science and belief. The unreliable narration allows the reader to gradually piece together bits of the story just ahead of the narrator, adding an additional layer to the book’s questions about what knowledge means. Yet for all of its philosophical aspects, the book itself is a relatively slim, neatly contained story that holds its mysteries close and invites both quick and deep readings. It’s the perfect book to jumpstart a conversation, but it is also successful as a fully absorbing solo journey into a beautifully imagined world adjacent to the one we call home.

Ethereal and Beautiful submitted by JR2571 on August 11, 2022, 4:16pm Just a masterclass in both worldbuilding and editing; it’s such an interesting setting but it only shows itself in service of the story. Phenomenal.

Surreal submitted by laurbretz on August 4, 2024, 6:47pm This has been on my TBR list for quite a while, and though I'm not sure I'd feel the need to read it again, I'm glad I finished it with an hour to spare before Libby automatically returned it! I love books with mythological allusions and elements of mystery and tension that deal with questions of humanity's search for knowledge and meaning, so this book did not disappoint. It's a creative idea and executed well, and I liked that it's partly written through journal entries. This allows us a point of view that cannot be extrapolated from neither internal nor external dialogue--it's what Piranesi wants to document, wants to remember, and gives us information as to how time is kept in this space.
The entire time you're reading this book, you know something is obviously wrong. It doesn't make any sense at first. Improper nouns are capitalized (I do always love it when things that aren't supposed to be Capitalized are, because it seems to suggests a Different conception of Things), Piranesi speaks of the world as if he's the only one occupying it (which he is), the House and the Tides are unlike anything in this world, existing in a liminal space that I can picture in my mind but is beyond reality. Piranesi is too naive and forgiving of the Other's mistakes as if he doesn't understand anyone could have intentions that are anything but pure. To me, this asked the questions, "must we be removed from our world to be truly good, kind, and understanding? When do we become different people? To what extent do we only exist in our own world? Who would I become to survive in a place like this?" Obviously there's some form of a resolution to the story in the end, and it didn't feel like there was a big twist or anything. However, it still didn’t feel incredibly predicable because it was well written and that in itself is why it was a good read.