Or What You Will

Starred review from April 20, 2020
Hugo and Nebula Award–winner Walton (Among Others) brilliantly braids somber realism, fanciful metafiction, and Shakespearean-influenced fantasy into a moving paean to the power of storytelling. The unnamed narrator inhabits the mind of Sylvia Harrison, a successful 73-year-old Canadian author. He has appeared, in various guises, as a character in all 30 of her books­­—including a fantasy trilogy set in Illyria, a rough analogue to Renaissance Italy—but he also exists independently of her fiction, if only as a figment of her imagination. Now Sylvia travels to Florence, to draft a sequel both to her Illyria books and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Though Sylvia is loath to admit it to the narrator or even to herself, the narrator knows that she is dying. Unsure of what will happen to him if Sylvia no longer exists, he devises a plan to save them both by immortalizing them in fiction. Walton shifts effortlessly between Sylvia’s life, Florentine history, and the plot unfolding in Illyria, giving equal weight to the mundane and the fantastic. The narrator’s voice is spellbinding (“What am I? Figment, fakement, fragment, furious fancy-free form. I have been the spark that ignites in a cold winter”), drawing readers into a nuanced meditation on reality and fiction. This gorgeous, deeply philosophical work is a knockout. Agent: Jack Byrne, Sternig & Byrne Literary Agency.

June 15, 2020
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.

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June 1, 2020
This is a story told by a nameless figment, an imaginary friend, a muse. He lives bound in the skull of aging author Sylvia Harrison, who is visiting Florence (which Walton refers to in the Italian, Firenze) and revisiting her story about a fictional city called Thalia. She is facing her own impending mortality; her muse wants to survive. Thalia is modeled on Renaissance Firenze, though it lacks Brunelleschi's innovative dome, and death there is voluntary. Thalia has its own peculiar politics, with an entertaining entanglement of characters from Shakespeare and history, and when the narrator sets his plan in motion, there are ripples that will disturb the long, comfortable rut of an immortal city of artisans. It is interesting to see this approach to the consequences of immortality and what it means to the creation of art to have stopped death by stopping progress. Meanwhile, Sylvia's situation is much more individual, focused on her own current experience. Fans of Walton's (Lent, 2019) style will be overjoyed with her storytelling here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2020

In Queen of Storms, the second in the "Firemane Saga," Hatushaly and young wife Hava restore the fire-blackened Three Stars in trade-rich Beran's Hill, but they aren't the cheerful innkeepers they appear to be (100,000-copy first printing). A young woman in small-town Queensland, Australia, undertakes a gothic journey after hearing from her long-gone brother, thus launching Hugo- and World Fantasy-nominated illustrator Jennings's buzzing debut novel, Flyaway. In The Relentless Moon, sequel to Kowal's Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winning The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, the moon is being colonized even as a meteor strike brings climate crisis to Earth. Originally scheduled for October 2019, Malerman's Malorie reveals what happens to the title character eight years after events in Bird Box, basis of the Netflix mega-hit. The perennial best-selling Modesitt's Quantum Shadows is set in a place called Heaven, where humankind's major religions each have their own land and places of worship are being scarily marked with inscrutable black images. With his stories already nominated for Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy honors, debut novelist Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) returns with The Unraveling, which dreams up a far-future, distant-galaxy, rigidly structured society where individuals have multiple bodies and staid-gendered Fift and bail-gendered bioengineer Shria wind up in the midst of an eyebrow-raising art spectacle. Salvatore's Relentless closes his "Generations" trilogy with Zaknafein reunited with son Drizzt Do'Urden and reconciled to life's unpredictability (100,000-copy first printing). In multi-award-winning Walton's intriguing-sounding Or What You Will, a character who's been a dragon, lover, scholar, warrior, and thief in the many books penned by Sylvia Harrison knows that the 73-year-old author won't be around much longer and is trying to figure out how the two of them can escape into immortality. Born in England to South American parents and raised in Africa near the historical territory of his Xhosa ancestors, Winter draws on his background to light The Fires of Vengeance, second in "The Burning" series, wherein a queen who has lost her throne joins with a young warrior in a battle to regain it (75,000-copy first printing).

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