Or What You Will

The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award–winning author presents a fantasy novel about the relationship between a writer and her creation.

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, seventy-three, 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 she 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 . . .

"Or What You Will is a Jo Walton book. Which is to say—it's a joy and a revelation, and I never wanted it to end." —Rainbow Rowell, New York Times–bestselling author