Review of "Piranesi" by Suzanna Clarke

A much better book than "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell". It's shorter, and better written, and the not-entirely elaborated idea is more interesting. It's very visual and evocative, and sensual. It's mainly set in a parallel universe made up entirely of an enormous building with many huge halls and staircases, in which a tidal sea is present.

She doesn't really explain why the first person narrator is called Piranesi - it's a name one of the other characters gives to him - but it actually does quite a lot of descriptive work, suggesting the vast, mysterious and gloomy spaces of that artist's work.

It's still a bit flabby at the beginning - it felt like it took too long to get going, but by about a third of the way in she absolutely had me. 

Odd personal connection is that a lot of it involves people at Manchester University in the early 1980s, where I was studying. If the people in the novel had been real I probably would have known them.