Piranesi

A sweet, bite-sized version of Susanna Clarke's world. I much preferred her massive tome, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I still consider a supreme masterwork of fantasy fiction. Mamma mia.

But that one is, admittedly, a kinda daunting read: 1k pages! This is a much more manageable ~300, and it has many of the same charming qualities of her other book:
- Magical Englishness
- Deep (19th century, capital R) Romanticism
- Characters who are fallible and amusing and fussy

This one has a much slower reveal - the book itself is basically a slow reveal, and we conclude with the “ah ha!” - but there's no surprises, necessarily. Or no false leads; every hint is just a straightforward increment in knowledge.

It was fine, good.