This is the story of a cool but slightly creepy near future technology that, in exchange for a lot of money, will give you recommendations of three things you can do that will make you happy - anything from eating ice cream to leaving your spouse or voluntary amputation. But it’s also so much more. It’s about happiness: what we would do for it, why we think we do or don’t deserve it; how our happiness can be another person’s misery and our misery can mean happiness for another person, or dozens or thousands or millions of people; how our happiness changes or doesn’t change with time, with tiny modifications to our lives, with enormous challenges. It’s about how we define who we are, to ourselves and to others, and how we present ourselves to ourselves and to the world, and how others see us, both literally and metaphorically. It’s about art – do you need misery to create it? If you’re happy, do you have to pervert your happiness to be an artist? Will the art be any good? It’s about technology and how we choose or don’t choose to use it, and the reality of our bodies and beings, and what we can and can’t choose and change and do about them.

I loved the writing, I loved the characters, and I loved the delicate, hidden complexity. Every time I think about it, I realize that every character and subplot has echoes elsewhere. Yet Williams has written so deftly that none of this is obvious - the pieces lie waiting for you to put them together, like the strange, delicate models that the protagonist loves. This is a beautifully presented story.