The Liar's Dictionary
A winner of the 2021 Betty Trask Awards
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3.6 • 12 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A WINNER OF THE 2021 BETTY TRASK AWARDS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2021
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'Joyous' SPECTATOR
'Remarkable' SUNDAY TIMES
'A playful delight... A glorious novel' OBSERVER
Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is riddled with fictitious entries known as mountweazels penned by Peter Winceworth, a man wishing to make his lasting mark back in 1899. It's up to young intern Mallory to uncover these mountweazels before the dictionary can be digitised for modern readers.
Lost in Winceworth's imagination - a world full of meaningless words - will Mallory finally discover the secret to living a meaningful life?
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'Made me almost tearful with gratitude that a book as clever as this could give such uncomplicated pleasure ... And when you find a book like this, you grab it, and you hold it close.' JOHN SELF
'A delight ... As funny and vivid as Dickens, as moving and memorable as Nabokov ... An extraordinarily large-hearted work.' THE CRITIC
'Deft and clever, refreshing and rewarding ... An assured and satisfying writer, her language rich and intricate and her characters rounded enough to be sympathetic and lampoonist enough to be terribly funny.' LITERARY REVIEW
'[The] most exciting of young British writers ... Williams luxuriates in words and wordplay, in definition and precision and invention ...The Liar's Dictionary is a public joy, and Eley Williams a free-spirited literary kook with bags of potential.' BIG ISSUE
'A singular, hilarious, word-drunk novel, which I suspect will be seen in the future as a classic comic novel.' DAVID HAYDEN, IRISH TIMES
'The Liar's Dictionary is the book I was longing for ... Positively intoxicated with the joy and wonder of language ... Eley Williams brings erudition and playfulness - and lovely sweetness - to every page.' BENJAMIN DREYER, New York Times bestselling author of DREYER'S ENGLISH
'This tale of lexical intrigues is an absolute joy to read! It's gloriously inventive and playful, but with just the right amount of heart.' LUCY SCHOLES
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Williams's comically inventive debut novel (after the collection Attrib.), a woman must ferret out the falsities intentionally embedded in a dictionary. Mallory, the sole employee of David Swansby at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, spends her days fielding angry, elliptical bomb threats from an unidentified crackpot. Then, one day, Swansby gives her a special assignment to find all the mountweazels placed in his family's dictionary over the years. (A mountweazel is a fake word placed in reference works to protect against copyright infringement.) Williams flashes back to 1899, when Swansby's is a bustling enterprise that employs many lexicographers, among them Peter Winceworth, who loves to dream up mountweazels ("relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish"). Mallory and her lover, Pip, search for these fake words and try to ascertain the identity of the anonymous mountweazeler, while in a parallel narrative Winceworth falls frustratingly in love with a fellow lexicographer's fianc e, leading to two surprising and emotionally satisfying conclusions. The author combines a Nabokovian love of wordplay with an Ali Smith like ability to create eccentric characters who will take up permanent residence in the reader's heart. This is a sheer delight for word lovers.
Customer Reviews
Amazingly good and full of words
This was amazing, and it finished too soon. I cannot wait to read it again.