- Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
- ISBN: 9781473562806
- Length: 288 pages
- Price: £7.99
The Liar's Dictionary
A winner of the 2021 Betty Trask Awards
BETTY TRASK AWARD WINNER 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2021
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'Joyous' SPECTATOR
'Remarkable' SUNDAY TIMES
'A playful delight... A glorious novel' OBSERVER
Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is riddled with fictitious entries known as mountweazels penned by Peter Winceworth, a man wishing to make his lasting mark back in 1899. It's up to young intern Mallory to uncover these mountweazels before the dictionary can be digitised for modern readers.
Lost in Winceworth's imagination - a world full of meaningless words - will Mallory finally discover the secret to living a meaningful life?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2021
______
'Joyous' SPECTATOR
'Remarkable' SUNDAY TIMES
'A playful delight... A glorious novel' OBSERVER
Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is riddled with fictitious entries known as mountweazels penned by Peter Winceworth, a man wishing to make his lasting mark back in 1899. It's up to young intern Mallory to uncover these mountweazels before the dictionary can be digitised for modern readers.
Lost in Winceworth's imagination - a world full of meaningless words - will Mallory finally discover the secret to living a meaningful life?
I have just read Eley Williams’s forthcoming novel The Liar’s Dictionary, a singular, hilarious, word-drunk novel, which I suspect will be seen in the future as a classic comic novel.
This tale of lexical intrigues is an absolute joy to read! It's gloriously inventive and playful, but with just the right amount of heart.
The Liar's Dictionary ... made me almost tearful with gratitude that a book as clever as this could give such uncomplicated pleasure ... Williams's triumph in The Liar's Dictionary is to bring together two people a century apart with a unifying comic vision ... and brilliant set pieces involving parties and pelicans, all in the service of an inquiry into language and words ... when you find a book like this, you grab it, and you hold it close.
Eley Williams is enraptured by the metaphysical intimations of language ... A novel that, in addition to everything else it manages to achieve and to be, stands in some ways as an embodiment of, and an affectionate reproach to, Samuel Johnson's definition of the form as "a small tale, generally of love" ...A delight. Williams handles their respective stories with a gripping command of the development of her plot...dazzling clarity of thought and vision, an extraordinarily fecund capacity for imaginative compassion. Some of these qualities lie in the freshness, elegance and lyricism of Williams's prose ... Yet her book is also gloriously full of gently sardonic asides; charmingly deadpan divagations; and an aptitude for the choreography of cartoon and slapstick that is as funny and vivid as Dickens, as moving and memorable as Nabokov ... For all its exuberance, however, this is ultimately a gentle and reflective book whose great preoccupations - the power of language to realise, shape, and deny our natures; the attributes, boundaries and meanings of human connection - are addressed with a care, intelligence and sensitivity that is suffused with an atmosphere of fellow-feeling, shared endeavour, friendship ... By attending so assiduously to the circumstances that propel them to this point, The Liar's Dictionary stands as an extraordinarily large-hearted work of obeisance to the lexicographical belief in the "transformative power of proper attention paid to small things", and as an ennoblingly expansive guide to the plangent lineaments of love.
The Liar's Dictionary is deft and clever, refreshing and rewarding ... Words and meaning are of paramount importance in this novel. Williams's naming conventions are Dickensian in their symbolism ... Williams is an assured and satisfying writer, her language rich and intricate and her characters rounded enough to be sympathetic and lampoonist enough to be terribly funny. Her writing owes something to Wodehouse but more to Waugh in his most amusing of disgruntled humours. In both storylines, there is a mystery to be uncovered and a dramatic - and violent - event to be endured. In neither are these the main focus. Rather, it is the connection between Mallory and Winceworth, as we watch each struggle with love, life and speaking their mind, that makes the book so delightful.
An 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.
[The] most exciting of young British writers ... [A] playful word wrangler ... Williams luxuriates in words and wordplay, in definition and precision and invention ... Both main characters are a joy ... Winceworth in particular could have wandered from the pen of Kingsley Amis ... The Liar's Dictionary is a public joy, and Eley Williams a free-spirited literary kook with bags of potential.
a lexicographical delight
A playful delight ... A virtuoso performance full of charm ... It's simultaneously a love story, an office comedy, a sleuth mystery and a slice of gaslit late Victoriana ... Recalls the early stories of Ali Smith, whose intellectually curious, free-range spirit Williams shares ... Williams keeps in sight big questions about language and identity. But as in Attrib. there's nothing arid about these investigations: this is a novel full of fun. Williams writes with fine comic timing, in prose glinting with goodies ... Throughout, you feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure. The Liar's Dictionary is a glorious novel - a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us.
There are a couple of first novels that I've been intrigued enough by their publicists to set on my personal hope-to-read pile: Eley Williams's The Liar's Dictionary
Details
Details
All editions
All editions
- Paperback 2021
- Ebook 2020
- Audio Download 2020