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The Word Exchange
by Alena Graedon
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Pub Date 8 May 2014 | Archive Date 18 Jun 2014
Description
A literary adventure for booklovers, a dystopian thriller about the digital age and a love story set in a world threatened by the disappearance of language.
In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted 'death of print' has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers and magazines are a thing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication, but have become so intuitive as to hail us taxis before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in an marketplace called the Word Exchange.
Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the NORTH AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the final edition that will ever be printed. Doug is an intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate - or even actually spoke to one another. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It's a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into danger...
Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague (who is secretly in love with her), Anana's search for her father will take her into dark basement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library, meetings of a secret society designed to save the written word, the boardrooms of the evil on-line retailing giant Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls of the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY - the spiritual home of the written word. As Anana pieces together what is going on, and Bart falls victim to the strange 'word flu' that is spreading worldwide, the very future of language is at stake...
A Note From the Publisher
The is the UK edition, therefore we won't be able to approve request from outside the UK.
Advance Praise
"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
"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, 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
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9780297869757 |
PRICE | £12.99 (GBP) |