Or What You Will

by Jo Walton

Overview

Or What You Will is an utterly original novel about how stories are brought forth from Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author Jo Walton.

He has been too many things to count. He has been a dragon with a boy on his back. He has been a scholar, a warrior, a lover, and a thief. He has been dream and dreamer. He has been a god.

But “he” is in fact nothing more than a spark of idea, a character in the mind of Sylvia Harrison, 73, award-winning author of thirty novels over forty years. He has played a part in most of those novels, and in the recesses of her mind, Sylvia has conversed with him for years.

But Sylvia won't live forever, any more than any human does. And he's trapped inside her cave of bone, her hollow of skull. When she dies, so will he.

Now Sylvia is starting a new novel, a fantasy for adult readers, set in Thalia, the Florence-resembling imaginary city that was the setting for a successful YA trilogy she published decades before. Of course he's got a part in it. But he also has a notion. He thinks he knows how he and Sylvia can step off the wheel of mortality altogether. All he has to do is convince her.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250309013
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

JO WALTON won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for her novel Among Others. Before that, her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. A native of Wales, Walton lives in Montreal.
JO WALTON won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her novel Among Others and the Tiptree Award for her novel My Real Children. Before that, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award. The novels of her Small Change sequence—Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown—have won acclaim ranging from national newspapers to the Romantic Times Critics' Choice Award. A native of Wales, she lives in Montreal.

Editorial Reviews

"Walton shines, as she always does, in the small and hurtful and glorious business of interpersonal relationships...this book about philosophy, history, gender and freedom also manages to be a spectacular coming-of-age tale that encompasses everything from courtroom dramas to sexual intrigue." —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing on The Just City

"A remarkable novel of ideas...Superb. In the end, the novel does more than justice to the idea of the Just City." —Booklist, starred review, on The Just City

From the Publisher

2020-06-03
Through the experiences of a novelist and her character, this fantasy explores the boundaries between life and death, fantasy and reality, creator and created, and intriguingly blurs the borders between each.

The novelist in question is Sylvia Katherine Harrison, who shares some, but decidedly not all, qualities with her author. But the narrator/protagonist of the story is a nameless, protean, pansexual character who has played a role in much of her fiction. This being persuades and assists Sylvia, who is slowly dying from cancer, to craft an escape from mortality via Illyria, a fictional realm she built in previous novels and which draws upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night as well as the best aspects of Renaissance Italy. As Sylvia writes a new novel concerning two 19th-century visitors from our world who presage change for the beautiful, magical, but essentially static society of Illyria, the narrator also helps her process the difficult parts of her past. If she can come to accept the strength of her fictional world as well as her own deepest truths, sourced in her damaging relationships with an impossible-to-please mother and an abusive first husband, she and her character may be able to fully transcend worlds. Walton continues to indulge an obsession with the two real-life Renaissance philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who appeared in different forms in her Thessaly trilogy and her previous novel, Lent (2019). They seem to represent the power that mind and will could potentially have over what we perceive of as the physical universe. (They also apparently serve nearly the same function for Walton in her creative process as this book’s narrator does for Sylvia.) Despite pondering the foundations of reality itself, the book doesn’t have quite the philosophical heft of those prior works. Instead, this is a deeply personal work and a charming love letter to Florence.

Odd, thought-provoking, and charming, with an emotional gut punch: quintessential Walton.

Kirkus Reviews