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.
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3 books in catalog
Alternative history and speculative fiction received a distinct contribution through the meticulous nineteenth-century pastiche and intricate magical lore of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. English author Susanna Clarke established her reputation with this expansive debut, blending historical realism with supernatural fiction.
Born on November 1, 1959, in Nottingham, England, Susanna Mary Clarke spent a nomadic childhood in towns across Northern England and Scotland. After graduating from St. Hilda's College, Oxford, she taught English as a foreign language abroad before returning to the United Kingdom to work as a cookery book editor in publishing. Her focus shifted toward novel writing after attending a fantasy-writing workshop in the early 1990s.
Clarke began writing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 1993, stitching the narrative together from fragments in her spare time over a ten-year period while publishing short fiction in the same universe. Bloomsbury acquired the manuscript in 2003 and published it in 2004. The novel became an international bestseller, earning the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, and British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year in 2005, alongside a longlisting for the Man Booker Prize. She followed her debut with the short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories in 2006 and her 2020 novel Piranesi, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award.
Clarke's prose features high-literary pastiche, authentic nineteenth-century narrative framing, and elaborate faux-scholarly footnotes that establish an immersive historical reality. Her narratives regularly address academic rivalries, hidden supernatural realms, ancient fairy lore, solitude, and the tension between rigid institutional control and wild magic.
