Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is short (240 pages) but it opens like a puzzle you did not sign up for. A man named Piranesi lives in a house of infinite marble halls, tides rise and fall through the lower levels, statues line every corridor, and he is having conversations with someone called The Other about scientific research. If you try to read it fast you will bounce off it. I did, twice.
What worked on the third try: I stopped trying to figure out what was going on. I let Piranesi’s voice do its work. The book is written entirely in his journal entries, and the pleasure is in his particular way of noticing things — the light through the vestibules, the specific patterns of the tides, his affection for particular statues. By the halfway point you know exactly what is happening, and it lands harder because you had to earn it.
It is now the book I keep buying for people who love slow-cinema movies or the poetry of Mary Oliver. Not for people who want plot. For people who want a specific kind of atmosphere, this is one of the best short novels I have read in years.