Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is a singular reading experience. It draws you into the quiet, echoing halls of the House, a world of endless statues, cyclical tides, and profound mystery.
We come to know this world through its sole living inhabitant, a man of boundless curiosity and innocence whose gentle voice belies the monumental secrets surrounding him. Leaving the House behind can feel like a loss, a departure from a world that is both a puzzle and a sanctuary.
If you are still wandering those halls in your mind, this list is for you. The novels gathered here do not replicate Piranesi, but they share its DNA.
Each one captures a facet of its brilliance, whether it’s a world that is also a character, a journey of philosophical discovery, the contemplative solitude of its protagonist, or the sheer beauty of its prose. Here are fifteen books that will allow you to get wonderfully lost all over again.
Before the House, there was the Napoleonic War, but with magic. If you loved Piranesi and have not yet read Clarke’s debut masterpiece, this is your essential next step. Set in an alternate 19th-century England, the novel follows two rival magicians who restore magic to the nation, with unforeseen and often dangerous consequences.
With Clarke’s signature blend of meticulous historical detail, dry wit, and otherworldly magic, this book creates a world as deep and textured as the House itself. While grander in scale, it shares Piranesi's slow, deliberate unraveling of a hidden, magical reality and is written with the same intelligent, beautiful prose.
This experimental novel is perhaps the ultimate literary labyrinth. A family discovers their small house is impossibly larger on the inside, containing a vast, dark, and ever-changing maze.
The story is told through a complex nesting doll of narratives, including academic footnotes, journal entries, and poems, with a page layout that physically mirrors the characters' disorientation. Like Piranesi, House of Leaves is centered on architecture as a source of mystery and dread.
It demands the reader become an active explorer, piecing together a terrifying puzzle from fragmented clues. For those who loved the architectural wonder and unsettling atmosphere of the House, this is a uniquely immersive and challenging read.
In this love letter to storytelling, a graduate student discovers a mysterious book that contains a story from his own childhood. His search for answers leads him to a secret, ancient library hidden deep beneath the surface of the Earth—a world of twisting tunnels, candlelit ballrooms, and stories that whisper through the walls.
The dreamy, immersive quality of Morgenstern's prose is a perfect match for the enchanting atmosphere of Piranesi. Both novels celebrate the magic of exploring a secret world and understanding one's place within a story far larger than oneself. It is a journey for those who believe in doors that shouldn't be there and the tales they lead to.
In 1327, a brilliant Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, arrives at a wealthy Italian abbey to investigate a series of bizarre deaths. His investigation soon centers on the monastery’s greatest and most forbidden secret: a labyrinthine library that is jealously guarded and rumored to drive men mad.
For readers who cherished the scholarly, methodical way Piranesi documented the House, this novel offers a similar intellectual thrill. The mystery of the abbey is tied directly to its architecture and the esoteric knowledge it contains.
It’s a dense, philosophical, and utterly engrossing historical mystery that shares Piranesi's reverence for the power of place and the pursuit of truth.
A team of four women is sent to explore Area X, a pristine and mysterious coastal region that has been cut off from civilization for decades. Inside, nature has reclaimed everything, but it has also been transformed into something alien and inexplicable.
The biologist of the expedition narrates their journey into a world that defies the laws of physics and biology. VanderMeer excels at creating a sense of profound isolation and wonder tinged with terror. Like Piranesi, the novel's power comes from observing a strange environment through the eyes of a solitary, thoughtful narrator.
It’s a book about the unnerving beauty of the unknown and the psychological toll of exploring a place that changes you as you explore it.
This collection of short stories from the Argentine master is a foundational text for fiction like Piranesi. Borges was obsessed with the concepts that animate Clarke’s novel: infinite libraries, paradoxical labyrinths, the nature of identity, and realities that are nothing more than intricate mental constructs.
Stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" are direct intellectual ancestors of the House. Reading Borges is like discovering the philosophical blueprint for Piranesi. His writing is concise, elegant, and mind-bending.
For those who appreciated the intellectual depth and the idea of a world as a metaphysical puzzle, this collection is essential reading.
In this novel, the explorer Marco Polo sits with the aging emperor Kublai Khan and describes the 55 fantastical cities he has visited on his travels. Each city is a breathtaking feat of the imagination—a city of memory, a city of signs, a spider-web city built over a chasm.
Yet as the descriptions continue, it becomes clear that every city is a different reflection of one place: Polo’s own Venice. Like Piranesi, Calvino’s work uses architecture and imagined spaces as metaphors for memory, reality, and the human mind.
The prose is lyrical, meditative, and hauntingly beautiful, offering the same sense of contemplative wonder as a walk through the House’s silent halls.
Growing up in the sprawling mansion of the wealthy Mr. Locke, a young and curious January Scaller feels like another of his strange artifacts. But when she discovers a peculiar book—The Ten Thousand Doors—she is drawn into a tale of secret doors, other worlds, and a love that crosses dimensions.
The book seems to know her, and it will lead her on a journey to uncover the truth about her own past. This novel shares Piranesi’s sense of a world that is far larger and more magical than it first appears.
It champions the power of stories and hidden passages, all written in a beautiful, lyrical style that evokes a powerful sense of wonder and yearning. It’s a perfect read for those who loved the mythic underpinnings and heartfelt discovery in Clarke's novel.
Carolyn was one of twelve orphans adopted by a god-like figure known only as Father, a being who possessed the entire knowledge of creation, which he cataloged in a library of unimaginable power.
After Father vanishes, Carolyn and her adoptive siblings must enter into a deadly competition, using their specialized, often horrifying, branches of knowledge to uncover what happened and seize control of the library for themselves.
While far more violent and brutal than Piranesi, this novel shares the core premise of a small group of people confined within a strange, esoteric world defined by its relationship to knowledge.
It is a story about piecing together a fractured identity and understanding a bewildering universe, all centered around a place of immense power and mystery.
A landmark of early weird fiction, this 1908 novel is presented as the manuscript of a recluse who lived in a remote, ancient stone house in Ireland. There, he experienced cosmic visions, time distortions, and assaults by grotesque, swine-like creatures from another dimension, as the house itself became a terrifying nexus point between realities.
Hodgson masterfully evokes a feeling of profound isolation and cosmic dread, grounding otherworldly horror in the tangible architecture of a single house. Readers captivated by the solitude and the blurring of physical and metaphysical space in Piranesi will find a haunting and influential classic here.
In the Eastern European city-state of Besźel, Inspector Tyador Borlú investigates the murder of a young woman. His case, however, becomes impossibly complicated, as the evidence suggests the killer may be from Ul Qoma—a city that occupies the very same physical space as Besźel.
Citizens of each city are conditioned from birth to "unsee" the other, making any interaction a capital crime. This brilliant novel is a masterclass in conceptual world-building. Like Piranesi, it is fundamentally an exploration of how perception, belief, and willful ignorance shape reality itself.
It wraps a compelling detective story around a profound philosophical puzzle.
A human envoy, Genly Ai, is sent to the alien planet of Gethen to persuade its nations to join a galactic federation. But to succeed, he must navigate the complex culture of a people who have no fixed gender.
They are ambisexual, becoming male or female only during a brief monthly period of fertility, a reality that shapes their society, politics, and psychology in ways Ai struggles to comprehend. Like Piranesi, this is a deeply philosophical and anthropological novel disguised as science fiction.
Le Guin uses a speculative premise not for action, but to thoughtfully explore themes of identity, duality, and what it truly means to understand an "other." It is a work of immense empathy and intelligence, much like Clarke's.
Two rival agents from warring futures, Red and Blue, travel across the threads of time to ensure their faction's reality wins out. They begin leaving taunting letters for each other, missives that grow from professional respect to a dangerous, forbidden love. While its plot is a romance, the novel's appeal for a Piranesi fan lies in its execution.
The prose is stunningly lyrical and poetic, and the narrative is an intricate, beautiful puzzle box. It shares a sense of grandeur, of being a small part of a vast and complex system, all told with a precision and beauty that Clarke's readers will deeply appreciate.
Sasha, a teenage girl on vacation with her mother, is coerced by a mysterious man into enrolling at a strange and sinister university. There, the assignments are nonsensical, failure has terrifying consequences, and the curriculum seems designed to violently transform the students' very reality.
This is perhaps the most intensely metaphysical book on this list. Like Piranesi, it operates on a dream-like logic that is at first bewildering but gradually reveals a profound, reality-bending purpose.
It is a demanding and unforgettable novel that explores the intersection of knowledge, sacrifice, and identity, leaving the reader as transformed as its protagonist.
A man returns to his childhood hometown for a funeral and is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where he once knew a remarkable girl named Lettie Hempstock. Standing by the pond she called an ocean, his forgotten memories come flooding back—memories of ancient magic, otherworldly threats, and the sacrifices made to keep him safe.
Gaiman is a master of blending the mundane with the mythic, and this novella captures the feeling of wonder tinged with melancholy that permeates Piranesi. It is a deeply moving story about memory, childhood, and the way magic can exist just at the edges of our perception, all told with a beautiful, atmospheric tone.
The magic of Piranesi lies not just in its plot, but in its unique atmosphere—the feeling of being in a place larger than comprehension, yet finding a home within it. From cosmic horror to philosophical fables, each book on this list shares a piece of that DNA, offering a new kind of labyrinth to explore.
These stories invite you to get lost, to question the nature of your surroundings, and to find beauty in the solitude of exploration. Happy reading, and may you always find new worlds to discover.