Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke

Info

Date Finished: 6/6/2026

First Sentence: When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of the Tides.

Last Sentence: The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Companion Album:

New Cover

A book cover for "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke. The background is a warm, golden-brown image of shimmering, rippled water reflections overlaid across a partially submerged classical white marble statue of a head. The title and author's name are printed near the bottom in a clean, white serif font outlined in dark gray.

A Few Thoughts

Go into Piranesi as cold as you can. Not since Ubik have I sat down to read a book and didn't get back up until I was halfway through. Piranesi grabbed me right away with its unsettling, liminal, yet oddly calming atmosphere.

Told through a series of first-person journal entries, Susanna Clarke tells a horrifying mystery story through the childlike eyes of Piranesi, a man who names years of his life after the animals he meets and the constellations he names.

I don't want to write too much more about the setting or, honestly, the story itself because its just one of those books you gotta experience yourself.

Cover Notes

Welp, finished this cover in GIMP and then it crashed while trying to save, so I lost all my work. But, I was able to sort of reconstruct it again. I did a mask of water ripples over a statue of a satyr. Read the book to find out why. Here's the source for the satyr image. And here's the source of the background water image. This approach was inspired by this book cover I found in Print Magazine.