The Liar’s Dictionary

Williams’s (Attrib. and Other Stories) first novel offers up a delicious love letter to language that readers of a sympathetic palate will devour. Following a Dorian Gray–like prolog of insights about dictionaries and the people who love them, the novel alternates between two London-based lexicographers a century apart. Back in 1899, the hapless Peter Winceworth toils away at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary in bored anonymity, speaking with an affected lisp and infatuated with the fiancée of his coworker and archnemesis. He finds his pleasures by inserting scores of mountweazels—fake words—into the dictionary-in-progress, assuming nobody will ever see them yet reveling in the possibility that somebody might. That person is Mallory, now an intern at the same dictionary looking to digitize its long-delayed second edition when she isn’t fielding phone calls by somebody threatening to blow up the building. Her partner in rooting out the mountweazels is her “flatmate” Pip, whom Mallory adores but is incapable of introducing publicly as her girlfriend, and together they try to uncover the identity of this lexical vandal. Buried beneath the torrents of puns and linguistic riffing is a story about two people from different eras connected by the thread of language, free to invent and repurpose words as they please, but who are less adept at navigating that far more indefinable terrain: the human heart.