A quirky novel about a woman who works for a dictionary publisher.
Description: Mallory is a young woman who is a bit lost in her professional career. She’s taken an internship with the publisher of an encyclopedic dictionary that is being digitized. Through some happenstance the publisher discovers that there are a number of fake words throughout the dictionary and Mallory must uncover them. The fun twist is that her story is interspersed with that of Peter Winceworth, the 19th-century man who added the fake words.
This book was an Amazon recommendation. I’ve never bothered with the recommendations before but I loved the cover of this book and ordered it on a whim. So much of the novel is about people who follow a whim. It’s quaint, slightly absurd, and overall a fun read.
Favourite Moment: Peter Winceworth is invited to an office party and feels ill at ease. He works out a plan to circulate the room with intent so as to not have to chat to anyone. Eventually he decides to hide behind a large potted plant, but he sidles straight into a young woman already hiding there.
The woman was crouching slighting and caught in the act of eating a slice of birthday cake. They stared at one another—both of their eyebrows went up at the same time and tilted into identical angles of surprise. Their expressions changed simultaneously: their eyebrows were at once a grave accent, then acute, then circumflex ò ó ô signifying shock then furtiveness and then an attempt at nonchalance. She deposited her cake into a beaded purse without breaking eye contact and then set her shoulders, and Winceworth, drunk enough to interpret this as an invitation to dictate proceedings, cleared his throat.
H is for humbug (n.), page 101
The Liar’s Dictionary is the perfect read for anyone who likes books, libraries, publishing, slightly absurd storylines, wordplay and puns, and cats.
Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less, blurbs the book, and so does CS Richardson, author of The End of the Alphabet. Both are good comps.