'Spine-tingling' New York Times
'A fast-paced, thrill-a-minute debut 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
Industry Reviews
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
