“Are You a traveler who has cheated Tides and crossed Broken Floors and Derelict Stairs to reach these Halls? Or are You perhaps someone who inhabits my own Halls long after I am dead?” And he speculates about “the Sixteenth Person,” the person he is writing his journals for. He knows the times he is supposed to meet the Other, the one living person who also inhabits the House, a well-dressed man who quizzes him on his knowledge of the House but treats him with mild disdain. He has located “all the people who have ever lived,” 15 in total, the bones of 13 of whom are located in various halls that he cares for tenderly. He has begun the long work of cataloging the statues who inhabit each room, classical-style representations of fauns, men fighting beasts, or children at play. He knows how to collect fresh rainwater from the upper halls, where lightning flashes in the clouds.

He knows how to fish and collect seaweed from the lower halls of sea and foam. Piranesi has been in the House as long as he can remember, long enough that he’s charted the tides that occasionally sweep through the halls on the main level, where he lives, and can predict when a room will be suddenly flooded. Unlike the House, Piranesi, the new novel by Susanna Clarke, abides by limits, and within those limits-thanks to those limits, in fact-it is a wonder. 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.It’s curious, then, that a novel set in the House feels so small. 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. 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 Piranesi is not afraid he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. 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. New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Women's Prize for FictionWorld Fantasy Awards FinalistThe instant New York Times bestselling novel from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic book set in a dreamlike alternative reality.

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