In Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel Piranesi, the mysterious structure is called the House.
The narrator lives in a vast world of marble halls, statues, staircases, and flooded rooms. He records his observations in journals and refers to the entire place as the House. The House appears to contain an immense network of architecture extending beyond ordinary human scale, with tides and weather moving through its spaces.
Only a few people seem to inhabit it. The narrator knows one as the Other, a figure who visits him and asks for help with an investigation. As the journals accumulate, gaps in the narrator’s memory and inconsistencies in his records gradually reveal that his understanding of the House is incomplete.
The title Piranesi refers to the narrator’s adopted name and evokes the eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, famous for imaginative architectural etchings. The House is not formally named a labyrinth or palace in the novel.