The Word Exchange
Alena Graedon
'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
Product Details
About Alena Graedon
Reviews for The Word Exchange
Liesel Schillinger
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Graedon's spectacular, ambitious debut explores a near-future America that's shifted almost exclusively to smart technologies, where print is only a nostalgia . . . it's as full of humanity as it is of mystery and intellectual prowess
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, starred review
[A] remarkable first novel, combining a vividly imagined future with the fondly remembered past . . . exquisite
BOOKLIST, starred review
A wildly ambitious, darkly intellectual and inventive thriller about the intersection of language, technology and meaning
KIRKUS, starred review
Alena Graedon's spectacular debut is a story for our age of 'accelerated obsolescence.' A genuinely scary and funny mystery about linguistic slippage and disturbance, it's also a moving meditation on our sometimes comic, sometimes desperate struggles to speak, and to listen, and to mean something to one another.To borrow Graedon's own invention, THE WORD EXCHANGE is 'synchronic'
a gorgeous genre mashup that offers readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance and philosophy. It's an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Imaginative, layered, and highly original, THE WORD EXCHANGE is an engagingly creepy story of technology gone wrong and a clever meditation on the enduring mysteries of language and love
Karen Thompson Walker, author of THE AGE OF MIRACLES Wow! This highly addictive future noir is also terrifyingly prescient. Set in a parallel New York filled with language viruses, pneumatic tubes, and heartbreak, Alena Graedon's book is luminous and haunting at every turn. I will never look at words in quite the same way-and neither will you.
Reif Larsen, author of THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET Can you imagine a future without books, newspapers or magazines? Alena Graedon has done just that - her debut novel conjures up a scarily plausible dystopian future, where print is dead and intuitive handheld devices are the only method of communication.
THE LADY
In Graedon's dystopian future, face-to-face interfacing is finished and even email is a fading memory; when the man working on the last-ever dictionary goes missing, his daughter sets out to find him and discovers murky anti-literate corporate forces and outposts of word-loving outlaws.
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE
The idea of technology taking over our lives to such an extent that we can no longer function without it was an interesting premise, and one that most of us will be able to relate to.
Louise Jones
THE BOOKBAG