Borderlands Books hosts Jo Walton, author of OR WHAT YOU WILL

Come join Borderlands Bookstore as they host Jo Walton for her latest, OR WHAT YOU WILL!

From Jo Walton, author of the critically-acclaimed and reader-beloved Among Others, and Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award winner, comes a new lyrical and philosophical novel: OR WHAT YOU WILL (A Tor Hardcover; On-sale: July 7, 2020). Walton’s latest is an utterly original novel about how stories work and how they are brought forth from a writer’s depths. With OR WHAT YOU WILL, Walton delightfully dramatizes the deep processes common to most writers and how their characters speak to them—with all their danger, cruelty, drama, and sublime charm.  It is the perfect book for anyone who LOVES literature: writing it, sharing it, and most of all, reading it!

Here is some of what people are already saying about OR WHAT YOU WILL:
“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

“Both intellectual and engaging, this is a book for readers experienced in the fantasy genre and who also enjoy thinking about the craft of writing.”—Buzzfeed

“Hugo and Nebula Award–winner Walton brilliantly braids somber realism, fanciful metafiction, and Shakespearean-influenced fantasy into a moving paean to the power of storytelling…
This gorgeous, deeply philosophical work is a knockout.—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

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 a 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.

JO WALTON won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for her novel Among Others. Before that, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. 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. Follow her on Twitter at @bluejowalton.