For a long time, while working as a cookbooks editor for Simon & Schuster, she had been obsessed with the idea of an alternate magical history of England. Tolkien not “as English fantasy but as high fantasy.” (Speaking for myself, I would toss the dealer the keys to the entire Lord of the Rings saga if it meant driving off the lot with the last two pages of “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” and I would whistle as I did it.)Īfter this brilliant beginning, though, Clarke almost disappeared from view before she had entirely emerged. “It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata.” Gaiman has called Jonathan Strange “the finest work of English fantasy written in the last 70 years,” though he sort of fudges the point by saying that he considers J.R.R. “It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance,” Gaiman later said. The story was the (legitimately brilliant) “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” about a trio of young women in Regency England who use (very) dark magic to subvert a misogynist plot the anthology in which it was collected won that year’s World Fantasy Award. There are writerly origin tales, and then there’s Clarke’s, which involves an instructor so impressed with her first short story that he sent it to Neil Gaiman, who was so impressed in turn that he went off and found a publisher for it. Clarke’s career has always contained a strong element of the uncanny. This is not, in and of itself, quite as surprising as it might sound. So Clarke’s second novel arrives like a magical text out of the plot of her first: a tome from nowhere, written by a vanished legend, apparently containing an intricate puzzle, and appearing, as if by magic, to mesmerize the world. (Here’s Reddit again: “ grabs paper bag, deep breaths.”) On Goodreads, five-star reviews have been piling up, most of them written by people who haven’t read the book (“just kind of shrieking incoherently right now”). Since the book was announced this past September, each new tidbit of information released by the publisher has prompted a fresh round of ecstatic commentary in fantasy forums. “There are a few moments in an agent’s life when something so unexpected and so wonderful pops up in your inbox, you can’t quite believe it,” Geller said. Before Piranesi materialized (substantially complete) in her agent Jonny Geller’s email, not even he knew she was writing it. “I have already sort of come to terms with Clarke never publishing a novel due to health stuff,” a representative Reddit comment ran last year. (Clarke has said she has chronic fatigue syndrome.) She’s only 60, but many of her fans had given up the hope of ever reading new work from her. Clarke, who is English, has reportedly suffered in the years since Jonathan Strange from health problems that made writing difficult. 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.Īnd that’s all we know. 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. Chances are, in fact, that you know as much about the new book as I do, which is to say, everything about it that’s been revealed to the general public: It’s called Piranesi it’s Clarke’s first novel since her actual first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, became one of the unlikeliest runaway successes in the history of the fantasy genre way back in 2004 (mountains of copies sold, editions in 34 languages, awards recognition, a BBC adaptation) it’s due out in September it’s set inside a house so impossibly vast that it contains (or as the publicity text intriguingly says, “imprisons”) an entire ocean its title character is a man who spends his life exploring this mysterious and labyrinthine and generally impossible-seeming ocean-bearing structure and its plot … well, let’s go back to the publicity copy: If you’re someone who might be excited by that sentence, chances are you knew and were excited long before you opened this article. Susanna Clarke has a new novel coming out later this year. Welcome to Ringer Reads, a semiregular column by Brian Phillips about his favorite books, writers, and various literary happenings.
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