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by Alena Graedon
A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word.
In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted "death of print" has become a near reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are essentially things 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 cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of our stomachs, change traffic lights and interface with home appliances - even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.
Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where they are hard at work on the final edition that will ever be printed. Doug is staunchly anti-Meme and fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate - or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving behind a written clue: ALICE. It's a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm's way. And thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbial rabbit hole…
Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways, the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the mysterious "Diachronic Society," meetings with executives of the corrupt corporate behemoth Synchronic, and ultimately the hallowed halls of the Oxford English Dictionary - the spiritual home of the written word. As Ana peices together what is going on, and more and more people succumb to a pandemic "word flu" that causes decaying language, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the price of technology and the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age.
"Starred Review. This is a remarkable first novel, combining a vividly imagined future with the fondly remembered past to offer a chilling prediction of where our unthinking reliance on technology is leading us. And, as you'd expect, Graedon's word choice is exquisite." - Booklist
"Starred Review. A wildly ambitious, darkly intellectual and inventive thriller about the intersection of language, technology and meaning." - Kirkus
"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." - 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
"Wow! This highly addictive future noir is also terrifyingly prescient...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
This information about The Word Exchange was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alena Graedon was born in Durham, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. This is her first novel.
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