HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Clarke’s international sensation, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, also a BBC series, has engendered an enormous fan base eagerly awaiting her new book. Threadbare Piranesi lives a spare, precarious existence, a noble innocent who believes that he has “a duty to bear witness to the splendors of the World,” while the Other, clearly prosperous and busy tapping at his “shining device,” is obsessed with seizing the power of “Great and Secret Knowledge.” As questions multiply and suspense mounts in this spellbinding, occult puzzle of a fable, one begins to wonder if perhaps the reverence, kindness, and gratitude practiced by Clarke’s enchanting and resilient hero aren’t all the wisdom one truly needs. Books that made me Books Susanna Clarke: ‘Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman taught me to be courageous in writing’ The Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell author on an underrated work by CS Lewis and the. The actual Piranesi was an eighteenth-century Italian artist who created etchings of monumental and menacing architectural labyrinths, and, indeed, the exceedingly strange world Clarke has invented for her Piranesi, a self-described scientist and explorer, is a vast maze inexplicably populated by birds and gigantic statues and through which tides rise and fall, smashing against the walls.

He doesn’t think Piranesi is his name, but that’s what he’s called by the older man he dubs the Other because he believes they are the only two people left alive. But the realm in which their increasingly suspect relationship unspools is a bizarre and baffling one that we encounter through the journals kept by Clarke’s earnest, spiritually creative narrator. In her highly distilled and rarefied first novel since her Hugo Award–winning debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Clarke posits another dynamic between a seeming mentor and mentee.

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