The Word Exchange

Wow! This highly addictive future noir is also terrifyingly prescient. Set in a parallel New York filled with language viruses, pneumatic tubes, and heartbreak, Alena Graedon’s book is luminous and haunting at every turn. 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

Alena Graedon’s spectacular debut is a story for our age of ‘accelerated obsolescence.’ 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.To borrow Graedon’s own invention, THE WORD EXCHANGE is ‘synchronic’–a gorgeous genre mashup that offers readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance and philosophy. It’s an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language - 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