NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the
Oxford English Dictionary
went largely unheralded.”—
The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks,
New York Times
bestselling author of
People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first
. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word
bondmaid
flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming,
The Dictionary of Lost Words
reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the
to tell this highly original story.
is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD