Everybody's Perfect

Jo Walton

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Book cover for Everybody's Perfect
Image for variant 9781250314055
Book cover for Everybody's Perfect
Image for variant 9781250314055

Everybody's Perfect

Everybody's Perfect

Jo Walton

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Description

Piranesi meets Swordspoint in an elegant relay race through fantasy Venice from Hugo award-winning author Jo Walton

The Serenissima is built from mist and belief, a mythical shadow sister to Venice and crossroads of the nine worlds.

When a laborer called Tiry has a dream that Serenissima will have a doge, and that they will marry the sea, he tells it to a fortune teller named Khadsha. She tells her apprentice, a gondolier called Taddeo, who tells a cop named Gom, who's heard it from five people this morning already. And by that point, it's already settled into the bones of the Serenissima, more than half-fated.

Everybody's Perfect is a gentle, shifting, structurally inventive narrative of startling beauty that will make you rethink everything you think you know about fantasy.

About the Author

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.

Critical Reviews

Praise for Everybody's Perfect:

"Enchanting and immersive. Every Jo Walton book takes you somewhere new and wondrous. I loved Everybody's Perfect."-- Rainbow Rowell, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of the Simon Snow trilogy.

"I am in awe of this book. Jo Walton is a writer's writer. I couldn't stop turning pages, marveling at the unexpected, vastly rewarding twists and turns of her misty Serenissima with its rogues and beggars, seers and sailors, and genders of all description. Whatever she invites us along on, we find ourselves wiser than when we began, with more insight into our own world through the one she's crafted for us." - Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint

"Everybody's Perfect is a beautifully graceful fantasy that floats through the enchanted canals of a Platonic Venice in which time, physical reality, and narrative move in mysterious ways. It's not quite like anything I've seen before and I loved it." - Delia Sherman

"An intimate fantasy, filled with ordinary people living everyday lives in an extraordinary place, and it drew me in immediately. It's a story where the happy ending depends on the ability of the people in the story to believe in its possibility, which feels weirdly relevant even though it's about communities of otherworldly aliens living in a fantasy Venice." - Naomi Kritzer

"Ambitious... personal and affecting. This fascinates." - Publishers Weekly

"Readers who loved the mixing of worlds in Marie Brennan's Driftwood or the world-crossing time-travel of Charlie Stross's "Merchant Princes" series will enjoy Walton's latest novel, as will anyone who has ever been caught up in the magic of the Carnival of Venice." - Library Journal, starred review

"A satisfying narrative experience with a hopeful depiction of the cycles of history." - Booklist

"Everybody's Perfect is a love letter to a strange city and all its contradictions. It's a meditative celebration of how we create history together, whether or not we know we're doing it, and of survival through and beyond times of plague. I adore this promise that history never ends, and that everyone who's ever contributed to a better future has been as flawed and frustrated as we are." - Ruthanna Emrys

"As gentle as the mists around Serenissima, and sometimes as stealthy, Everybody's Perfect shifts the masks of Venice's Carnival sideways into a deeper fantastical reflection on what we owe each other. Filled with compassion and invention, this is Walton at her strongest." - Marissa Lingen

Praise for Jo Walton:

"Funny, acute, and impassioned."--Ursula K. Le Guin on Among Others

"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

"Rendered with Walton's usual power and beauty...It's this haunting character complexity that ultimately holds the reader captive to the tale."--N. K. Jemisin, The New York Times, on My Real Children

"A deeply poignant, richly imagined book...What most novels do only once, My Real Children does twice."--Lev Grossman, Publishers Weekly

"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 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

Publishing Information

Publisher: Tor Books
Pub date: 2026-06-30
Length: 272 pages

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