"Piranesi," by Susanna Clarke

🧩 One thing said about book clubs is their selections help expand one's reading horizons. This book, while shorter, will test that principle for you. It is light fantasy/scifi that involves deep thinking. A number of readers have compared it to an adult Narnia. It is a puzzle within a mythscape, a mystery with philosophical undertones, a surrealist painting with a haunted house feel. You might have more questions after you finish than when you started. Get ready for a unique reading experience! 🧩

This novel has won a number of literary awards, including the Women's Prize for Fiction and Audie Award for Audiobook of the Year, and it's been nominated for a slew of others.

From Goodreads:

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

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. 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.