Piranesi

A philosophical fantasy novel written in the form of a diary, exploring themes of loneliness, memory, and the boundary between madness and enlightenment.

The protagonist lives in a strange world he refers to simply as the House. It is a vast spatial anomaly: an endless labyrinth of enormous Palladian halls, whose lower levels are flooded by the sea and ravaged by destructive tides, while in the upper levels, where there is no ceiling, winds roam freely and clouds drift overhead. The walls of this House are entirely adorned with tens of thousands of unique statues. The hero cannot remember his own name or anything about his life before he found himself in the labyrinth, and so he allows the Other — the only other living person in this world — to call him Piranesi, after the Italian engraver famous for his fantastical images of vast prison-like spaces.
Day after day, Piranesi keeps his journal: he catches fish, catalogues statues, talks to birds, and meets with the Other twice a week. The Other is searching the House for the “Great and Secret Knowledge” and always appears in clean modern clothes, with a smartphone in hand.
Piranesi’s serene and harmonious existence, rooted in his sincere love and reverence for the House, is disrupted when messages written in chalk begin to appear in the halls. In the world of the labyrinth, there is now someone else — a third presence.