Piranesi

This long awaited follow-up to Clark’s celebrated Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a quieter, calmer fantasy novel with some wonderfully nasty surprises in its third act. Piranesi uses the trappings of the magic portal tradition of Narnia, but strips away the quaint aspects of the genre by playing out the violence of suddenly finding yourself in a strange new world without knowing how to return home. The world itself is extremely memorable—a landscape made of only interior hallways and marble statues, but also filled with water, clouds, and avian life. Piranesi begins as a dream of pure fantasy, and indeed perhaps as a pure novel, and slowly shows how both Eden and art will always be corrupted by human hands.