The Word Exchange
-
- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'Spine-tingling' New York Times
'A fast-paced, thrill-a-minute début novel' New Yorker
'Graedon knows how to ratchet up mystery' Esquire
WORDS ARE UNDER THREAT.
IT'S TIME TO FIGHT BACK...
Imagine a world without words.
A world in which books, libraries and newspapers are things of the past.
A world where personal devices provide all you could want or need.
Anana Johnson and her father, Doug, are hard at work on the final edition that will ever be printed of the English Dictionary. But one evening, Doug disappears and Anana unearths a single written clue: ALICE.
In the battle to save her father, Anana discovers secret societies, dark incinerator rooms and underground passages.
Above all, she finds a world that faces ruin from the dark side of technology.
Praise for The Word Exchange
'A nervy, nerdy dystopian thriller' New York Times Book Review
'A propulsive, twisty future-noir' Daily Beast
'Spectacular' Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
'Dazzling' Slate
'Wildly ambitious, darkly intellectual and inventive' Kirkus Reviews, starred review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Graedon's spectacular, ambitious debut explores a near-future America that's shifted almost exclusively to smart technologies, where print is only a nostalgia, and nostalgia is only an archaism. But while everyone carries "Memes," devices with enough data to negate the need for memory let alone vocabulary and can even anticipate wants and needs, Anana Johnson works closely with her anti-Meme father Doug, a famous lexicographer, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language. But when Doug goes missing, what once seemed like a luddite's quaint conspiracy theory takes on new plausibility, and with it, new threat, as the city quickly falls victim to a fast-spreading "word flu" virus. Chapters alternate between Ana's narration and the journal entries of her friend and colleague Bart, shedding light and inserting lacunae by turns. With secret societies, conspiracies, and mega-corp Synchronic's menacing technologies, Graedon deploys all the hallmarks of a futuristic thriller, but avoids derivative doomsday sci-fi shtick. Instead, her novel is rife with literary allusions and philosophical wormholes that aren't only decorative but integral to characters' abilities and limitations in communicating, and it succeeds precisely because it's as full of humanity as it is of mystery and intellectual prowess.
