Publisher’s 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.
My description: Mostly, when people write about Venice in fiction they write about carnival. I’m not doing that. I’m writing about the place, the economy, the real weirdness — but of course, this also isn’t Venice, this is the Serenissima, the magical alter-Venice that connects to Venice and to eight other worlds with their own people. So this is both more and less real than most Venice books. What they mean by “elegant relay race” is that it has multiple non-recurring points-of-view, so the point-of-view passes from one to another, but it’s all one story. It’s about people and connections and plague and power. I wrote it in 55 writing days between March and December 2025.
The gorgeous cover art is by Caroline Jamhour.
Publishers Weekly https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250314055
“An exercise in elaborate worldbuilding, this ambitious outing from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Walton (Or What You Will) transports readers to the fantastical city of the Serenissima, “built on nothing but layers of magical mist and memories and dreams.” The Serenissima’s geography shifts with the fog that drifts through it, “opening a new square here, closing up an old canal there, like a face caught in the fleeting act of changing expression.” Its waterways, maintained by shared belief in their existence, connect eight disparate worlds, including Earth. The Venetians believed the Serenissima into being first, and through it soon found neighbors: beings who look much like the Venetians, but with the faces of cats, dogs, or domino masks garlanded with flowers and feathers, and who connect to the magic of the Serenissima in their own ways. Against this inventive backdrop, a fisherman wakes from a dream that the city will elect its first doge. A local mystic confirms that she can see this coming to pass—and also sees a cure for the plague that blights the fisherman and his lover—after which the city itself pulls everyone around him into the rush to fulfill the prophecy. Told through the eyes of nine different characters, each with a perspective and backstory rich enough for its own novel, the relatively low-stakes plot still manages to feel personal and affecting. This fascinates.”
It will be released on June 30th 2026, by Tor Books. It can be preordered right now from all good bookstores.
