At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren't taught history, geography, or mathematics--they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as "poets," and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose. Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. Drawn in to their strage world, which is populated by people named Bronte and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skilful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love. Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an "outlier," immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power. A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, "Lexicon" is Max Barry's most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.
Industry Reviews
"A dark, dystopic grabber in which words are treated as weapons, and the villainous types have literary figures' names. Plath, Yeats, Eliot and Woolf all figure in this ambitious, linguistics-minded work of futurism."--Janet Maslin, "New York"" Times" "Imagine, if you will, a secret group of people called Poets who have the power to control others simply by speaking to them. Barry has, and the result is an extraordinarily fast, funny, cerebral thriller."--"Time Magazine" "An extremely slick and readable thriller.""--Washington Post " "Barry has a gift for spinning complicated plots that aren't weighed down by their intricacies. His prose here is dark and incisive, and he creates sympathetic (and often quite funny) characters. There's nothing inherently scary about words, and yet the author acknowledges that they have the capacity to throw entire societies into chaos, Tower of Babel-style. In Barry's world, evil dwells in the everyday ways the public is manipulated by language--through politicized media, push polling and targeted advertising--and words become as frightening and lethal as a looming pandemic. All this makes "Lexicon" more sophisticated and laden with subtext than your average genre thriller, and clearly reaffirms Barry's status as a gifted purveyor of suspense.""--Time Out New York" ""Lexicon" is a strange combination of romance, thriller and science fiction. Imagine blending the works of Neal Stephenson with Michael Chabon and the end result would come close to the world envisioned by Barry. The words brilliant and exemplary aren't adequate enough to convey the amazing craft of "Lexicon.""--Associated Press "A clever blend of sci-fi and thriller, with touches of romance and humor... persuaded me anew that words are, indeed, the bomb.""--Dallas Morning News" "It's a pitch-perfect thriller, a jetpack of a plot that rocketed me from page one to page 400 in a single afternoon, and it ke
