In 2019, he edited and published the Underdog anthology and co-wrote the cabaret show Siblingship. Tobias’s debut novel, Anything But Fine, was published in 2021, and was awarded the Australian Association of Family Therapy’s Book Award for Older Readers, was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for Older Readers, was named one of Better Reading’s Top 50 Kids Books (2022), and was included on Bank Street College of Education’s list of Best Children’s Books of the Year (US, 2023). His second novel, Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell, was published in 2022 in Australia and 2023 in the US. Tobias’s third YA novel, Wrong Answers Only, is out now in Australia and the US!

One of the many things I love most about reading is that it allows you to travel literally anywhere in the universe—or to another universe entirely—from the comfort of your couch, or bed, or beach towel. Books open doors to other worlds and elicit a special kind of wanderlust that, I believe, can only be conjured by turning a page. So, to help with your literary exploration, here are seven books that will take you to extraordinary places …

Wrong Answers Only by Tobias Madden (me!)

Fancy taking a cruise to nine of the most iconic, idyllic ports in the Mediterranean? Want to taste some tapas in Barcelona? Sample some snails in Toulon? Throw in some family secrets, best friend drama, and hot gay guys making questionable decisions, and this book really is the all-you-can-eat buffet you’ve been waiting for!

The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley

If you fancy a trip to Europe without the teen angst, you should definitely sign up for The Guncle Abroad. You’ll get to tour some of Europe’s hottest locales with everyone’s favorite witty guncle and his precious (precocious?) niece and nephew. This whirlwind family getaway is sure to warm your heart.

The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey

If the freezing cold of deep space is more your speed, than take a tour of the outer reaches of the solar system in this epic sci-fi saga. Launching with Leviathan Wakes, this brilliant, nine-book series takes readers all the way from Earth to the moons of Jupiter and far, far beyond. It is mind-bending and utterly breathtaking.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Speaking of mind-bending, why not let Susanna Clarke personally guide you through Piranesi’s house—labyrinthine, infinite, full of marble statues, and periodically flooded by a vast, inexplicable sea. Is there anything beyond the walls of house? Is there anyone else in the world but Piranesi and the Other? Well, you’ll just have to visit to find out!

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

If you like the sound of marble statues but you’d like a little more star-crossed gay romance thrown in, why not head back to Greece and spend some time with our dear friends Achilles and Patroclus? This book will make you feel like you’re sipping wine and breaking bread with the Grecian armies as they lay siege to Troy. Oh, and you’ll be crying the whole time. I should probably mention that…

Midnight Library by Matt Haig

If you’re not afraid of a good cry, you might also want to pick up this global bestseller. You’ll travel with Nora to the Midnight Library and, from there, to alternate lives all over the world as our protagonist tries to right her wrongs and find her perfect life. But is there such a thing? And does the Library have the answers?

The Bump by Sidney Karger

Wyatt and Biz certainly don’t have the answers, but they do have a baby on the way imminently, so they need to get their shit together. Surely a babymoon road trip from NYC to California will give them the time and space to figure everything out before there’s a little one begging for their attention at every minute of every day… Right? Well, no, not exactly, but it makes for one hell of a trip!

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Susanna Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was longlisted for the Booker and Hugo award winning, was published all the way back in 2004. At first, Piranesi appears to be its opposite in every way: Jonathan Strange clocks in at just over 1000 pages, whereas Piranesi is a slim 272 pages; gone are the footnotes, the nineteenth century pastiche and omniscient narrator, in favour of a first-person narrator and the clear, precise prose of a scientifically minded journal. Whereas the scope of one was epic – spanning years, continents, and even worlds – the other is more intimate, even claustrophobic despite the enormity of the setting. But despite these aesthetic differences, they have more in common than would first appear.

Firstly, while the mode of the prose may be different, it still has the same gothic-tinged quality that makes it recognisably Clarke’s. Secondly, both are preoccupied with magic (the “Great and Secret Knowledge”), what happens to our world when it leaves and where it goes. In Jonathan Strange, Clarke presents magic as “the language of trees and rain and the stones of old cathedrals, of all the mundane things that made up the pastoral landscape of a forgotten English past.” In Piranesi, the strange labyrinth Piranesi himself inhabits is described as the rock hollowed out and shaped by the flow of magic over time, and, in both, wielding magic involves communing with natural forces.

The statues that fill the labyrinth with some small and some gargantuan, some pristine and others broken, while all possessing an unearthly beauty, they represent every idea, thought, and experience that’s ever existed; symbols that, like the bee, sword  and key in Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea (whose underground story space bears some similarity to Piranesi’s labyrinth), or Lyra’s alethiometer, can be decoded on various levels of meaning. (There is a lot of classical imagery, from Minotaurs to the Faun that also graces the front cover, to Piranesi’s name itself, which is a reference to an Italian artist famous for painting fictitious labyrinths and prisons.)

There’s also a similar conflict over how magic should be used. The Other wants it to have power over others, and sees the House and everything in it as a means to an end, whereas Piranesi appreciates the beauty in everything, taking none of it for granted.

The book starts off rather slowly, as we only know what Piranesi knows, which, at the beginning, is practically nothing. But as Piranesi’s understanding increases, the plot unspools like a ball of yarn, gathering pace before culminating in a surprisingly suspenseful finale.

Similarities aside however, Piranesi is not just a retread of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It may be slim but, like an onion, it has many layers to peel back and explore. Clarke’s second novel is definitely worth the wait.

Piranesi is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of September 17th 2020.

Will you be picking up Piranesi? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.

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.

For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

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