The eagerly anticipated, playful, and profound debut novel from an utterly original, award-winning writer.
Eley Williams lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. The Liar's Dictionary is her debut novel.
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.
*Irish Times*
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.
*Lucy Scholes*
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. In each setting she creates a completed world full of
sticky details ... There are pleasingly silly jokes (a series of
cats called Tits), delight taken in names (Winceworth's nemesis is
Frasham, a man who would now be described as a jock) and brilliant
set pieces involving parties and pelicans, all in the service of an
inquiry into language and words ... Language is what enables
Winceworth and Mallory to communicate indirectly through the
entries in Swansby's dictionary, and back to back on the pages of
this novel ... Look: it's possible that I am the perfect reader for
this book and that no one else will get as much out of it as I do.
But it gave me the same joie de livre that I got from the likes of
Italo Calvino, Nicholson Baker and Andrew Crumey when I first
started reading fancy grown-up novels twenty-odd years ago. And
when you find a book like this, you grab it, and you hold it
close.
*The Critic*
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 Critic*
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.
*Literary Review*
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