Book· 2020· Fantasy

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi: it draws on 2 recorded sources.

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What influenced Piranesi

The works this one is recorded as drawing on.

The Chronicles Of Narnia

Book · 1950

InfluenceHIGH

Susanna Clarke opens the novel with an epigraph from The Magician's Nephew, and its villain, Valentine Andrew Ketterley, shares his name with that book's magician Andrew Ketterley. The endless House echoes the Wood between the Worlds, and a dream of a faun in a snowy forest speaking to a girl is Tumnus and Lucy.

Ficciones

Short Story · 1944

InfluenceMEDIUM

Susanna Clarke discussed Borges's "The Library of Babel" (in Ficciones) as an inspiration for the novel's infinite House, alongside "The House of Asterion".

About the work

Piranesi

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.