The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams

Notes From Your Bookseller n nA playful take on a sometimes-pretentious subject, The Liar's Dictionary is a superbly whimsical novel from wordsmith Eley Williams. Williams' debut novel successfully intertwines both contemporary and historical story plotlines, meditates on the meaning of agency, and allows language itself to be rightfully center-stage. Prepare yourself to be delighted! n nNATIONAL BESTSELLER ? You wouldn't expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, [it] is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama. --The New York Times Book Review n nAn award-winning novel that chronicles the charming misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world. n nMountweazel n. the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. n nIn the final year of the nineteenth century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby's multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But his disaffection with his colleagues compels him to assert some individual purpose and artistic freedom, and he begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries. In the present day, Mallory, the publisher's young intern, starts to uncover these mountweazels in the process of digitization and through them senses their creator's motivations, hopes, and desires. More pressingly, she's also been contending with a threatening, anonymous caller who wants Swansby's staff to burn in hell. As these two narratives coalesce, Winceworth and Mallory, separated by one hundred years, must discover how to negotiate the complexities of life's often untrustworthy, hoax-strewn, and undefinable path. An exhilarating, laugh-out-loud debut, The Liar's Dictionary celebrates the rigidity, fragility, absurdity, and joy of language while peering into questions of identity and finding one's place in the world. n nEditorial Reviews n n*10/19/2020 n nIn 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 fiance, 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. (Jan.) n- Publishers Weekly n n12/01/2020 n nDEBUT NOVEL Williams's (Attrib. and Other Stories) first novel offers up a delicious love letter to language that readers of a sympathetic palate will devour. Following a Dorian Gray-like prolog of insights about dictionaries and the people who love them, the novel alternates between two London-based lexicographers a century apart. Back in 1899, the hapless Peter Winceworth toils away at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary in bored anonymity, speaking with an affected lisp and infatuated with the fiance of his coworker and archnemesis. He finds his pleasures by inserting scores of mountweazels--fake words--into the dictionary-in-progress, assuming nobody will ever see them yet reveling in the possibility that somebody might. That person is Mallory, now an intern at the same dictionary looking to digitize its long-delayed second edition when she isn't fielding phone calls by somebody threatening to blow up the building. Her partner in rooting out the mountweazels is her flatmate Pip, whom Mallory adores but is incapable of introducing publicly as her girlfriend, and together they try to uncover the identity of this lexical vandal. Buried beneath the torrents of puns and linguistic riffing is a story about two people from different eras connected by the thread of language, free to invent and repurpose words as they please, but who are less adept at navigating that far more indefinable terrain: the human heart. VERDICT Expect sharply divided opinions here, but devoted fans of Ali Smith will gleefully succumb to Williams's tale of acrobatic wordplay.--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ n- Library Journal n n2020-10-27 nSteampunk meets philology in a century-hopping debut novel. n nA pair of budding lexicographers working on the same dictionary, one at the end of the 19th century and the other at the beginning of the 21st, alternate chapters and narratives in this confection of love and language. Winceworth, a neurotic young editor with an affected lisp, is working on the S section of Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, then a flourishing enterprise. Meanwhile, more than a century later, Mallory takes an internship at what's left of the dictionary: cases of blue index cards covered with definitions housed in a magnificent, crumbling Victorian building on a prime block of London. In between their eras, World War I stopped the dictionary in its tracks, sending the young workers off to the trenches and melting down the printing presses for ammunition; the entries for Z remain unfinished. In her half of the novel, Mallory performs the disturbing twin assignments of fielding threatening phone calls and hunting down mountweazels--made-up words deliberately inserted into the dictionary. In his half, Winceworth broods over office politics and invents the words that Mallory is rooting out. Williams, a charming stylist, is at her best when she's writing breathlessly about the blossoming of romantic love: Mallory's for her girlfriend and Winceworth's for a colleague's fiancee. Plentiful events--explosions, trysts, betrayals--give the impression of a lively plot, though key mysteries remain unresolved, particularly in Winceworth's narrative. (What is the real identity of the mysterious beauty? What is the bully's motive?) Surprisingly, the least exciting aspect of the novel is the vocabulary words, many of which word mavens may well already have encountered in listicles of, for example, color terms or names for body parts (glabella, philtrum, pons). Nevertheless, people who read dictionaries for fun will likely enjoy the selection. n nA sweet and diverting story, witty and sincere, from a promising newcomer. n- Kirkus Reviews n nONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ? An Indie Next Pick, B&N Discover Pick, and Amazon Best Book of the Month n nYou wouldn't expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, Eley Williams's hilarious new book, The Liar's Dictionary, is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama....A thoughtful inquiry into truth and meaning. n--The New York Times Book Review n nAn audacious, idiosyncratic dual love story about how language and people intersect and connect, and about how far we'll go to save what we're passionate about...Showcases a delight in language that evokes both Nabokov and--more on point with its mix of playfulness, profundity, warmth, and heart--Ali Smith. n--NPR n nDelightful...Underneath this novel's extremely bookish mystery is the idea that our identities are as improvisatory as the words we affix to them, and that even the dictionary, the most seemingly staid and impartial arbiter of truth, is an 'unreliable narrator.' n--The Wall Street Journal n nA playful paean to lexicology...Although the book abounds in dramatic incident, its main focus, like the characters', is not actions but words, and 'the transformative power of proper attention paid to small things.'--The New Yorker n nPlot is not why a reader should come to The Liar's Dictionary. One approaches it instead for highly charged neurotic situations and for Williams's adept word-geekery. Her esotericism is always on cheerful display. n--The New York Times n nThe Liar's Dictionary is the book I was longing for. So eudaemonical, so felicific and habile! A harlequinade of cachinnation! It's hilarious and smart and charming and I loved it. Read it. It's the book you're longing for. n--Andrew Sean Greer, 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for Less n nAn improbably enchanting, rollicking novel about two generations of put-upon London lexicographers, The Liar's Dictionary is positively intoxicated with the joy and wonder of language, both authentic and, often hilariously, counterfeit, and I can assure you that it's quite the contact high. Eley Williams brings erudition and playfulness--and lovely sweetness--to every page. n--Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer's English n nA virtuoso performance full of charm...It's simultaneously a love story, an office comedy, a sleuth mystery and a slice of gaslit late Victoriana...The Liar's Dictionary is a glorious novel--a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us. n--The Guardian n nPerfectly calibrated...For a novel as finely tuned as this, to leave one with a sense of the intoxicating hopefulness of chance is its greatest achievement in a competitive field. n--Los Angeles Review of Books n n[An] incisive meditation on language...Williams interrogates the charged nexus where language 'meets' human experience. n--Chicago Review of Books n nComically inventive...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. n--Publisher's Weekly (starred) n nAn imaginative, funny, intriguing novel...Williams has created a supremely entertaining and edifying meditation on how language records and reflects how we see the world, and what we wish it could be. n--BookPage n nA remarkable novel...Original and often very funny, The Liar's Dictionary is an offbeat exploration of both the delights of language and its limitations. n--Sunday Times (UK) n- From the Publisher