I found this book to be beautiful. Everything about it had beauty... the dust jacket, the book cover, inside the cover and then the writing. Oh, the writing. It swept me up from the very beginning and even though I barely could fathom what was going on, I wanted to keep reading. Every word seduced me into that world even more.
In the story we meet Piranesi. He lives in a labyrinth of a house with many rooms and halls and statues. There is an ocean that flows into part of this house. This provides Piranesi with food. In the top most part of the house is clouds. This provides Piranesi with water. The only others to keep him company are the birds, 12 sets of bones and The Other. The Other meets with him twice a week and goes his way afterwards. This is Piranesi's simple existence until it isn't and everything he has known is thrust into chaos.
I loved every single word of this story. I also feel that there was more to the meaning of it than I was able to grasp. I will be pondering this story for a long time to come. It will be one that I will probably journey into again in the future.

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Works so well because, like the House itself, it works on so many levels ...

It reminded me of "Waiting for Godot" and "The Magus," by John Fowles -- deceptively simple stories, cunningly made something special by their private mythology ...

Our guide to the House is Piranesi. That's what the only other living human being in the House, the Other, calls him. "Which is strange because as far I remember it is not my name ..."

In addition to "Piranesi" and the Other, there are the skeletal remains of 13 other people, our first substantial clue that, however much Piranesi insists on seeing the House, and his strange existence in it, as benign, and part of some natural order of things, there is something pretty dark going on here.

The House is a 3-D Memory Palace, a maze of hundreds of Rooms, Halls, Stairways and Vestibules, each one filled with statues and wonders and clues. The ripped up pages of a diary, woven into seagulls' nests. Crisp packets and other trash, scattered around a cubbyhole containing a dirty sleeping bag, which Piranesi tut-tuttingly tidies, without wondering why he know what "crisp packets" are, but is baffled by words like "university" and "Battersea." There are other clues that Piranesi once had another life. Such as his favourite statue,

"⦠the statue of a Faun ⦠He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips. I have always felt that he meant to tell me something or perhaps to warn me of something: I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child."

You can't -- SHOULD NOT -- say too much, because this is a book that deserves to be read cold. Almost anything you can say would be saying too much. I've probably said too much already. My ultimate compliment: as soon as I finished it, I wanted to start it again, so I could see how she's done it.

"The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite."

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