Content warning: There is an emotionally abusive parent. There is a very realistic and rather grim depiction of an abusive marriage. And there is either a miscarriage or an abortion – we never really find out which.

Every so often I read a book, and as I read I start making a list of all the people I know who will love this book and then I keep reading and writing down more names, and after a while I just stop bothering with the list, because all my friends are now getting this book for Christmas.

This year, everyone is getting Or What You Will for Christmas. This is an absolute wonder of a book, full of Shakespeare and Florence and writing and food and love and poetry and strangeness. It’s a story that drew me in so deeply that I became completely immersed, and just swam through it as though I could breathe the water and would never need to surface. At a time when we can’t travel, it feels like travelling; at a time when I have found it hard to focus, it engaged my attention completely. It shifts so seamlessly between reality and fantasy that I had to keep stopping to check whether this particular character or that particular restaurant really existed in our world, or really did that… and in some cases, I’m still not sure.

It’s the sort of book where you finish it and you don’t want to leave. I have so many books that I desperately want to read right now, and yet I can’t bring myself to start, because I don’t want to lose the sense of being in Firenze, of being in Thalia, of being spoken to by the narrator and watching as Shakespeare is twisted and turned and made rich and strange and queer (more queer than it already is) and wonderful (more wonderful than it already is). And I desperately want to go to the Teatro del Sale, which really does exist, but which is as inaccessible to me right now as Thalia is.

But perhaps I should tell you what this book is about.

Sylvia Harrison is dying and the man inside her head wants to live.

She won’t let me tell all the stories. She says it’ll make them all sound the same. She’s had too much of my tricks and artfulness, she says. I have been inspiration, but now she is done with me. So I am trapped inside this cave of bone, this hollow of skull, this narrow and limited point of view that is all I am allowed, like a single shaft from a dark lantern. She has all the power. But sometimes she needs me. Sometimes I get out.

We don’t know his name. He speaks to us directly throughout the book, and we know that he has been in many of the characters she has written over the years, that he is separate to Sylvia, and has his own motivations, not all of which she is aware of. At times, he can even act for her and without her. But nonetheless, he is trapped in the ‘bone prison’ of her skull, and when she dies, his existence will also come to an end.

Sylvia is a writer of fantasy. She has written many worlds, but her first world, and the one she has come back to with her final novel, is Thalia. Thalia is Renaissance Florence (or Firenze, as we must call it, for that is its name and not the one bestowed on it by French conquerors) as Shakespeare envisaged it and it is populated with some of his characters, but also with a number of the great philosophers and artists of the Renaissance, who somehow crossed into this world where nobody dies until they choose to.

The story Sylvia is writing now is about Orsino, the Duke of Thalia, who is under attack from Caliban, intent on revenge for sins committed by Orsino towards his son, Orsino’s half brother. Because the wizard Miranda was married to Caliban once, before she married Ferrante, and Orsino was her second child who usurped the Duchy from his brother, just as Antonio once took his Duchy from Prospero. As one character points out:

“We have here a story of two pairs of brothers and two incompetent dukes, like an illustration of why hereditary monarchy is wrong.”

Orsino’s household comprises Viola, who still dresses as a young man most of the time, Sebastian, who frequently dresses as a beautiful lady, and Olivia, and there are hints both that the marriage is a poly one, and that Sebastian may play Viola at times in public, as he is better at that sort of thing than she is.

Into this world fall Tish and Dolly, fresh from the Victorian era. Dolly is the son and heir of a noble Florentine house; Tish an English debutante. They are both of a studious and intellectual bent; Dolly is fond of Shakespeare, and Tish reads Latin and Hebrew. (They bond over the fact that they were both major fans of Cicero and even wrote letters back to him as children. As someone who has had many a crush on long-dead historical figures, my heart melted with joy.)

The novel alternates between chapters from the point of view of the nameless narrator, telling us about himself, about Firenze, about Renaissance philosophers, and about Sylvia’s life; and chapters of Sylvia’s Thalia story. As the book progresses we see him inserting himself into the story, and then coming out again to argue with Sylvia or collaborate with her or to try to push the story in the direction he wants.

The two stories increasingly begin to merge, which is his intention – he hopes that if the story can be written in the right way, both he and Sylvia can escape into Thalia and live.

I was a bit nervous going into this story, because the reviews online kept telling me that it was very literary and metafictional, that one really needs to know Shakespeare very well to understand it at all. As a lazy reader, this sounded like very hard work!

I promise you, it isn’t. Quite the contrary – while it did take me a few chapters to get the hang of the story, it captured me utterly, and I soon found that my problem was not getting into it, it was getting out of it. I did not want to do anything except read this story. As for the Shakespeare references – they are many and delightful, but if you know the plots of Twelfth Night and of The Tempest, you know enough to enjoy this story. (I know almost nothing about art or the Renaissance, and I’m fairly sure that there were all sorts of equally delectable Easter Eggs in the text for people who are more knowledgeable in that area, but I still loved every bit of what I read, and it just made me want to learn more about the actual history of Firenze. And whether Brunelleschi did have a thing for breaking eggs.)

There were so many things in this book that made me gasp or laugh out loud in delight. When Tish first arrives in Thalia she is rather shocked to be given a doublet and breeches to wear in place of her wet clothes, but is informed that “passing as a man is the very first thing you should do, if you possibly can.” I squeaked with glee. In Thalia, it is, apparently, quite normal for women to dress as men and go out into the world and have adventures before they get married (and it is very rude to draw attention to the fact that they are women, if one notices this) – so while the ‘giovane’ period (being an unmarried youth) is sort of technically for young men only, it’s pretty normal for women to change their names and their attire and become young men as well, at least for social purposes, for as many years as seem good.

The descriptions of Firenze are astonishingly vivid. I am the sort of reader who finds it hard to visualise things, but I had the strongest sense of place reading this story, even though I have never been to Firenze in my life. The golden stone, the narrow streets, the wide piazzas, the dome of the cathedral, the rose garden, all somehow worked their way into my head, though I don’t precisely recall where they were described. It really did feel like I had been away on holiday while I was reading this book, and as though Firenze was a place I had been to, long ago, and faintly remembered, rather than one I had only read about.

The narrator is a fascinating character, part poet, part muse, part God, part helpless creation in the hands of his author. He is terrified for his future, he is dependent on us, the readers, to save him, and yet he is confident enough (arrogant enough?) to dare us not to read further, if we are bored or do not care. But he also charms us and seduces us into keeping on reading. He loves Sylvia and he protects her and he resents her. His voice is another delight. In the early chapters, he is almost self-consciously poetic, and the prose is so dense that it nearly has texture. He also addresses the reader very personally:

Now that I have addressed you directly, don’t let it worry you that you are in this story. Nobody will make you do anything but what you are doing already, reading and making the story live in your mind. I’m not about to inform you that you are walking down a long hallway with fraying carpet, which brightens as you pass a lace curtained window, whose sill holds a single blossom of red geranium, drooping in a neglected flowerpot next to a dusty pile of books, their green and orange spines slowly fading to teal and lemon. I won’t ask you to decide the colours of the carpet (vermillion and ash) or of the tired paint on the walls. Most especially I will not say you are putting out your hand to turn the dented brass knob set in the peeling green paint of the door that leads out into the rose garden, only to have you revolt against me and jerk your hand sharply away, saying to yourself “Like hell I do!”’

We may get into the rose garden and discover its secrets eventually, but that isn’t the way.

It is also absolutely necessary that I comment on the food in this book because this book does food exceptionally well. It takes food porn to the highest possible level. I was making noises. Mostly, I was making noises because of the Teatro del Sale, which is this incredible restaurant in Florence founded by a famous chef who makes fancy food at his fancy restaurant but is also a great big socialist (huzzah!) who believes that everyone should be able to eat amazing food, so you can become a member of the Teatro for €7 and eat the most amazing variety and quality of food there for €15 at lunch, or €20 at dinner, and it just sounds like the most wonderful culinary and social institution I’ve ever read about. Also, there is political comedy in the evenings, because of course there is.

But the real reason to go is that the food is incredibly, unbelievably, implausibly good, so good superlatives crack under the burden of trying to describe it. You could use a whole thesaurus just saying how good the salads are and still not manage to get it across. There’s a spelt salad; spelt, the grain that usually in history means things are really bad if people have resorted to eating it, but here it’s perfect. All Italian ingredients are better than ingredients anywhere else, and Teatro del Sale is the pinnacle of perfection. Sylvia usually just says that it has the best food she has ever eaten anywhere and lets it go at that. Their gnocchi are astonishing. The carrots deserve to have odes written to them. It’s the sort of place you can’t quite believe exists. It strains probability that there could be something this good. You can’t believe you’re there even when you are there, even when you can go again tomorrow.

Incidentally, I had a LOT of trouble picking a quote to put here, because clearly the author, or the narrator, or Sylvia, or all three, feel VERY STRONGLY about the Teatro del Sale, and spend the better part of a chapter explaining in great detail what a miracle of restaurant it is, and I was torn between utter delight that such a place could exist (because yes, it does, it is real and in our world and I looked it up on the internet and it has a website and everything) and sorrow because Florence might as well be a fantasy world right now, with things as they are. But I now have a new life goal, which is to go to Florence and eat at the Teatro del Sale every day.

Also, I desperately need to know what they are doing with those carrots. Because we return to the amazingness of those carrots several times.

She looks around at the happy people enjoying their food. Some are hanging around the window waiting for the last course and watching chickens being pulled off the spits and cut apart. “I’m not sure I could even get people to suspend their disbelief in the carrots.” She eats another forkful of them. “I’m not sure I could even describe the carrots.”

You have no idea how much I need the recipe for those carrots.

But I shall tear myself away from the food – which is hard, I’ll have you know, because I haven’t even mentioned the gelati from Perchè No!, let alone the feasts of fruit and omelettes and cakes in Thalia – to talk about Sylvia. Because the book, really, is about her – her life, and her writing and her imagination and her mortality. Even the Thalia story, which is ostensibly fantastical and not about Sylvia at all, is the child of her imagination, and imagination is quite a tangible thing in this story. Even the narrator is a part of Sylvia. Or perhaps he isn’t – the question of how much characters are themselves and how much they are Sylvia is left unanswered, and there is plenty of ambiguity that could lead you in either direction.

Sylvia’s story is told out of order, as our nameless narrator is able to coax her into letting him tell it. So we have the easier parts first, and the more painful parts later, and I should tell you that there are some very painful parts. You saw the trigger warnings at the start; I won’t say too much about them, because they are spoilerish, but you should know that this story describes pain as vividly as it describes food or writing or Firenze (vividly, but not graphically – we see the internal, emotional impact very clearly, and that is more than enough).

Sylvia’s grief for the loss of her beloved husband, Idris, is particularly poignant – her musings over the last text he sent: “I’ve finished Olondria. Can’t wait to talk to you about it!” and on the conversations that will never take place perfectly encapsulated that utter, all-encompassing interruption of a life cut short. (And one lovely touch about the relationship between Sylvia and the narrator is that for all the narrator’s mild jealousy of Sylvia’s other characters, there is no jealousy of her real life relationships, and they both recoil in horror at the very notion that he might somehow animate a fictional Idris.)

This is not a sad or dark story – Sylvia has lived her life well – but it is the story of an entire lifetime, and no life is free of pain.

There are so many wonderful things in Or What You Will that I could go on and on forever until this review was as long as the story itself. I am torn, right now, between apologising for the length of the review, and between adding another of the six or twelve or twenty-seven other absolutely perfect things in this book that fill me with delight and happiness and wonder. This truly is a story about all the things I love – history and writing, food and fantasy, Shakespeare and travelling. It is about overcoming abuse and thriving; of living a life of creativity and intellectual endeavour, that nonetheless has room to appreciate the pleasures of the senses: the scent of the roses in the garden, the warmth and beauty of sun on golden stone, the taste of redcurrant and fior de latte gelato.

It is a story about writing wonderful stories and living wonderful stories, and while it is in no way a romance, it may be a love story after all – though the object of that love may be a story, or a person, or even one’s own self.

But above all, it is a story about our own stories and how we tell them or allow them to be told. There is a moment when Sylvia says to the narrator, “This is your story. You really can change it if you want to.” By letting him become the storyteller, Sylvia relinquishes her power over the narrative, and in doing so, gives him the power to tell a new story that will – perhaps – save them both.

So may we all change our stories, when we need to.

I love this book. I want to live in this book. I want you to live in this book, too. It’s a Squee from me.