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Everybody's Perfect
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50 copies available
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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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
272 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication June 30, 2026
614 people want to read
About the author
Jo Walton
86 books3,092 followersJo Walton writes science fiction and fantasy novels and reads a lot and eats great food. It worries her slightly that this is so exactly what she always wanted to do when she grew up. She comes from Wales, but lives in Montreal.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
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September 5, 2025Most fantasy novels that are about Venice are about Venice at carnival, whereas this is about a Venice that is both more and less real. The Serenissima isn't Venice, it's fantasy Venice, a place of canals palazzi and shifting reality, where nothing stays where you put it and different species from different worlds live together in complex patterns. It's about daily life in an unreal city. I wrote it to get myself unstuck after a long pandemic burnout, and it seems to have worked. It has multiple first person points of view, which is always fun for me to write, and the novel works like a relay race, handing off POV from one to the next as it moves.
I think it's pretty good. It's a bit weird, but all my books are a bit weird really. I had fun writing it. I hope you have fun reading it.
I think it's pretty good. It's a bit weird, but all my books are a bit weird really. I had fun writing it. I hope you have fun reading it.
Want to read
September 10, 2025Normally not a fan of cozy fantasy, but anything Jo Walton writes will be interesting.
Want to read
September 23, 2025I’m already on board for anything Jo Walton writes, ever, and just hearing about the metaphysics of this world already made my head explode with joy. Can’t wait!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for allowing me to read this e-arc prior to its official release.
I was lured in by the description: “Piranesi meets Swordspoint in an elegant relay race through fantasy Venice”. However, I think it’s misleading. This is not a story of high-stakes adventure. There is no racing. It is a slow exploration of a world, and even multiple worlds, with several fascinating concepts, but it is slow, nonetheless.
The story was like a meandering, shifting dream where you’ve forgotten who you are in real life and instead live as an entirely new person in the dream world, completely different from yourself, yet somehow all your thoughts are your own and no matter how strange or illogical the dream seems after you wake up, while living in the dream, everything made perfect sense.
Indeed, this story is set in Serenissima, a cloudly, dreamlike Venice that connects several worlds (including ours). What people believe becomes true, although not easily. For example, the collective belief of the inhabitants causes the cloudy sky to lighten and darken, mimicking day and night although there is no sun.
It took me a while to differentiate and remember the characters of the different peoples/species, each of which are human-like but with differing heads. Thankfully, at the beginning of each section, there is at least a description of the main character’s species and appearance which helped. We flow from one person’s perspective to the next, each connected to each other. Some perspectives were more fantastical, others more modern (a girl’s love for wikipedia), but in all of them there was something relatable.
Each species’s world and cultures were truly fascinating: the Zanguni who valued learning above all and killed those with magic or the supernatural, the Laodikans who define gender based on time of birth, day or night in rigid delineations, etc. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to different groups of people in real life. I loved how the cultures were explored through each POV character, most immigrants to Serenissima, but some born there, and how each of them were outcasts in their own ways yet held complex longing for their home world or closer connection to others of their species.
The last line of the book: “There are no answers, never answers, only questions” describes exactly how I felt upon finishing. A satisfying yet unsatisfying end at the same time. There were several threads I thought were leading somewhere but didn’t come up again, hints of political intrigue in Serenissima that I wanted to see more. But again, if we return to the idea of this book being a dream, such an ending also makes sense. I’m already nostalgic for this world, wishing I too could go to Venice and explore Serenissima and all those other strange yet familiar worlds.
Overall, the setting and world-building were the stand-out with charming characters I felt for. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a narrative fantasy that explores a lot of intriguing ideas.
I was lured in by the description: “Piranesi meets Swordspoint in an elegant relay race through fantasy Venice”. However, I think it’s misleading. This is not a story of high-stakes adventure. There is no racing. It is a slow exploration of a world, and even multiple worlds, with several fascinating concepts, but it is slow, nonetheless.
The story was like a meandering, shifting dream where you’ve forgotten who you are in real life and instead live as an entirely new person in the dream world, completely different from yourself, yet somehow all your thoughts are your own and no matter how strange or illogical the dream seems after you wake up, while living in the dream, everything made perfect sense.
Indeed, this story is set in Serenissima, a cloudly, dreamlike Venice that connects several worlds (including ours). What people believe becomes true, although not easily. For example, the collective belief of the inhabitants causes the cloudy sky to lighten and darken, mimicking day and night although there is no sun.
It took me a while to differentiate and remember the characters of the different peoples/species, each of which are human-like but with differing heads. Thankfully, at the beginning of each section, there is at least a description of the main character’s species and appearance which helped. We flow from one person’s perspective to the next, each connected to each other. Some perspectives were more fantastical, others more modern (a girl’s love for wikipedia), but in all of them there was something relatable.
Each species’s world and cultures were truly fascinating: the Zanguni who valued learning above all and killed those with magic or the supernatural, the Laodikans who define gender based on time of birth, day or night in rigid delineations, etc. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to different groups of people in real life. I loved how the cultures were explored through each POV character, most immigrants to Serenissima, but some born there, and how each of them were outcasts in their own ways yet held complex longing for their home world or closer connection to others of their species.
The last line of the book: “There are no answers, never answers, only questions” describes exactly how I felt upon finishing. A satisfying yet unsatisfying end at the same time. There were several threads I thought were leading somewhere but didn’t come up again, hints of political intrigue in Serenissima that I wanted to see more. But again, if we return to the idea of this book being a dream, such an ending also makes sense. I’m already nostalgic for this world, wishing I too could go to Venice and explore Serenissima and all those other strange yet familiar worlds.
Overall, the setting and world-building were the stand-out with charming characters I felt for. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a narrative fantasy that explores a lot of intriguing ideas.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a free review. Release date June 30th, 2026.
I've read almost all of Jo Walton's books, so I was very excited to get an advance copy of her latest. In Everybody's Perfect, a series of linked vignettes follow the lives of people in the Serenissima, a strange misty Venice between worlds. Fortunes are won and lost, hearts are broken, and a new Doge slowly rises out of rumors.
Everybody's Perfect has nine point of view characters, each with their own section. All of the characters are loosely entwined, and every new section jumps to a new character introduced in the previous vignette. Each character is a different species from another world linked to the Serenissima, and all of them have the faces of Venetian masks: harlequin, dogheaded, garlanded by flowers, etc. This is a bit gimmicky as a speculative biology feature, but Walton does an excellent job making each culture feel distinct. Also, all of the characters feel fresh and individual, probably because they strongly disagree with each other on everything from basic facts of their world to judgements on other characters. For instance, scheming, ambitious magus Khadsha thinks compassionate Pell who volunteers for a charity is far too softhearted. Gina from our own February 2020 thinks Khadsha's visions of the future are entirely a scam, and she's discovered a bananapants scheme involving Venetian time travel supremacy on Earth which never comes up in any other character's section. It's a delightful mixed bag.
On a number of levels, this book hit what I want out of "cozy fantasy" but never quite find in books that are explicitly marketed as such. The book's stakes are mostly small-scale and intensely personal, with no titanic battles or fate of the world at risk. Still, they matter very much to the characters, whether it's living with chronic illness or the very young Yix struggling to keep her family afloat. While there's not much of a throughline in the plot except the collective manifestation of the doge in the background and the expanding consequences of an AIDS-coded deadly sexually transmitted plague, all of the stories refer back to each other and mesh together in unexpected ways. It felt like a cohesive whole rather than a collection of short stories.
A reading experience that felt very much like the best bits of reading a Septimus Heap book as a kid: all of the little stories at the back telling you about what happened to minor characters. Possibly not my favorite Walton book to date—it's a very competitive field—but bright, conversational, and intriguing, with a sharp touch for worldbuilding. Recommended.
I've read almost all of Jo Walton's books, so I was very excited to get an advance copy of her latest. In Everybody's Perfect, a series of linked vignettes follow the lives of people in the Serenissima, a strange misty Venice between worlds. Fortunes are won and lost, hearts are broken, and a new Doge slowly rises out of rumors.
Everybody's Perfect has nine point of view characters, each with their own section. All of the characters are loosely entwined, and every new section jumps to a new character introduced in the previous vignette. Each character is a different species from another world linked to the Serenissima, and all of them have the faces of Venetian masks: harlequin, dogheaded, garlanded by flowers, etc. This is a bit gimmicky as a speculative biology feature, but Walton does an excellent job making each culture feel distinct. Also, all of the characters feel fresh and individual, probably because they strongly disagree with each other on everything from basic facts of their world to judgements on other characters. For instance, scheming, ambitious magus Khadsha thinks compassionate Pell who volunteers for a charity is far too softhearted. Gina from our own February 2020 thinks Khadsha's visions of the future are entirely a scam, and she's discovered a bananapants scheme involving Venetian time travel supremacy on Earth which never comes up in any other character's section. It's a delightful mixed bag.
On a number of levels, this book hit what I want out of "cozy fantasy" but never quite find in books that are explicitly marketed as such. The book's stakes are mostly small-scale and intensely personal, with no titanic battles or fate of the world at risk. Still, they matter very much to the characters, whether it's living with chronic illness or the very young Yix struggling to keep her family afloat. While there's not much of a throughline in the plot except the collective manifestation of the doge in the background and the expanding consequences of an AIDS-coded deadly sexually transmitted plague, all of the stories refer back to each other and mesh together in unexpected ways. It felt like a cohesive whole rather than a collection of short stories.
A reading experience that felt very much like the best bits of reading a Septimus Heap book as a kid: all of the little stories at the back telling you about what happened to minor characters. Possibly not my favorite Walton book to date—it's a very competitive field—but bright, conversational, and intriguing, with a sharp touch for worldbuilding. Recommended.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Serenissima is a place made of mists and timelessness, desire and will. What is not attended to will fade away; what is believed will become. Like Venice, it is a city of islands and canals, where trade is the lifeblood of the economy. It sits at the edge of nine worlds, between reality and Chaos. People come from eight worlds to mingle and trade, some for a short while, some for a lifetime.
This story is a mosaic, told in the from the perspective of an individual from each of the peoples resident here. The characters are both strange beyond imagining and very familiar and relateable.
A powerful work by an ever-inventive writer.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
This story is a mosaic, told in the from the perspective of an individual from each of the peoples resident here. The characters are both strange beyond imagining and very familiar and relateable.
A powerful work by an ever-inventive writer.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
February 28, 2026
Very interesting book but it’s also very weird and it’s left me a lot of questions. This book makes me feel like I’m missing a lot of things.
I enjoyed the fact that each chapter had the point of view of a different character, which makes it fun and you get to know about the world more but I’m still a bit confused about what exactly world is?
Is it a dream like cloud world or parallel magical world with human like creatures?
It was still enjoyable I just really couldn’t get into it even though I do like Venice.
I enjoyed the fact that each chapter had the point of view of a different character, which makes it fun and you get to know about the world more but I’m still a bit confused about what exactly world is?
Is it a dream like cloud world or parallel magical world with human like creatures?
It was still enjoyable I just really couldn’t get into it even though I do like Venice.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Weird in a good way. I was expecting a certain amount of dreaming about Venice -- which this delivers. I wasn't expecting science fiction, and that is a very interesting journey. On the whole I liked it -- good characters, an unexpected plot, themes of contagion and alienation from community and the creation of communities; themes of magic and wandering. A bit of a slow burn of a book.
Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss.
Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss.
Want to read
March 10, 2026The new novel by one of my favorite writers. Of course I'll be reading it. The author's comments are nearby: "It's a bit weird, but all my books are a bit weird really. I had fun writing it."
Due out at the end of June 2026.
Due out at the end of June 2026.
Read
January 21, 2026Thank you NetGalley for the eARC!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Some authors write the same book over and over, and I love it. Some authors reinvent themselves with every book, and Jo Walton is one of those. This is a strange and beautiful book.
Read
February 26, 2026I'll post my review closer to the publication date in June
Want to read
March 10, 2026Piranesi AND Swordspoint?! This is also giving Stravaganza for adults and I am here for it
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews