Being ‘busy’ can be an excuse for anything but it’s not a good excuse when it comes to missing out on a nugget of news that you’d normally file under ‘life or death’.

In this case, the news that Susanna Clarke has a new novel coming in September. It may have taken her ten years to write Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but from where I was sitting when I disappeared for two weeks to Fuerteventura to do nothing but read that, swim and drink orange juice, it was worth every day.

Have I proclaimed it to be the greatest novel ever written? Yes. Many times over.

Anyway, assuming you missed it too (and assuming you care) it’s called Piranesi and so far as I can gather, it: follows the story of its eponymous hero, who lives in the House, a building with “hundreds if not thousands of rooms and corridors, imprisoning an ocean. A watery labyrinth.” Occasionally, he sees his friend, The Other, who is doing scientific research into “A Great and Secret Knowledge”. Piranesi records his findings in his journal, but then messages begin to appear, and “a terrible truth unravels as evidence emerges of another person and perhaps even another world outside the House’s walls.

Count me in all the way up to my shoulders.

Off the record, I’m going to put some (ie: a lot of) work into the cover art for it because out there in the big world, stranger things have happened.

They really have. Be careful what you wish for because you might spend the next ten years of your life at it.