MY ⭐️ RATING: 5/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
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.
MY REVIEW
I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy this, if at all. It’s completely different from anything else I have ever read, but it sucked me in instantaneously. Both the story and characters were phenomenal, but the biggest surprise was that the narration was done by Laurence Olivier Award winning actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor never expected someone so big, would be narrating a book. The job he did was astounding to say the least. The voices that he used for each character and the way he was able to evoke the feelings of each one forced my eyes to never want to leave the page.
“They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!”
Piranesi is a mysterious tale that is likened to Leo DeCaprio’s, Shutter Island. For the longest time you don’t really know what’s going on, but as the story develops, more and more information is given and you slowly start to see things. It’s very thought provoking and made me constantly think about the words on each page, if something was a clue or not to what was going on. I really enjoyed this very much. The characters were just as fantastic as the plot was, and Piranesi without question is a superb character given so much opportunity to be fleshed out in such little time. I’m not 100% sure I would call this fantasy, even though it’s tagged that way on Goodreads. Maybe low fantasy, but this is more on the level of just fiction/mystery, but I now realize why people love mystery books so much. It was exciting seeing everything unravel. I’m definitely reading more Susanna Clarke after this!
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