about the book
You have heard the saying “Words can kill”? Well, the truth is…one word, a very powerful “bareword”, can really kill violently…and there are those who will do anything to get that word.
Emily Ruff, sixteen, was recruited right off the streets of San Francisco. This runaway and three-card Monte hustler extraordinaire has a natural aptitude with words. She can persuade anyone into doing anything. The mysterious recruiters fly her first class to an exclusive, secret academy in Virginia. There, the hand-picked prodigies are taught by master word manipulators how to coerce and control.
It doesn’t take Emily long to rise to the top of her class. The best of the best, she should graduate as a “Poet” and will be able to join a very secret and influential organization.
But Emily is a rule breaker and hates being told what to do. She gets booted out of the academy and sent to a tiny nearly annihilated mining town in Australia, where she falls for a paramedic, Harry. Before long, the word manipulators will regret the decision to kick her out!
Meanwhile, two powerful Poets, Woolf and Eliot, are at war. Two years before, Woolf set loose the infamous bareword in the remote mining town of Broken Hill, Australia, and 3,300 residents were slaughtered. One hapless carpenter, Wil Parke survived, though his memory was wiped clean. Now Eliot is hunting Wil, convinced the man is capable of stopping this bareword that persists like an echo. If Wil’s unusually rare brain cannot be controlled by Poets, Eliot is sure that he can use Wil to unravel the bareword’s elemental code.
In order to survive, Wil and his protector, Tom, journey back to Broken Hill to discover who he is and why the town was annihilated. Slowly, the paths of Wil and Emily converge, the body count rises, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance as they spiral toward an event that could leave all language meaningless.
For you word-addicted readers out there, this dark, funny novel is a thriller you won’t be coerced into putting down!
about the author
There was never a time that Max Barry didn’t want to be a writer. As a teenager, he remembers really being into Stephen King and “big, doorstop novels, with love and scale and terrible things in the basement.”
Now he is writing his own twisted novels, but so far, he hasn’t felt the need to descend into his own scary cellar. Instead, he has learned, with very little prompting, that reader’s form conclusions about what’s happening and it is his job to conjure up particular ideas, emotions, and images. He tries to say less and relies on implication and suggestion. If one of his five books doesn’t work for a reader, he claims it might just be because the reader has a defective brain!
A web-geek, pioneer blogger, and corporate satirist, Australian native Barry started out selling high-end computer systems for Hewlett-Packard, while secretly writing his first novel, Syrup, on a corporate laptop he never returned! Three of his novels are optioned for feature films and his book Lexicon is following that trend. For his novel Jennifer Government, Barry created the highly popular online political simulation game NationStates.
Max lives in Melbourne with his wife and two daughters. You can find him hard at work there, often clad only in his boxer shorts!
Sources:
Author website
Author interview: Bite the Book
Author interview: io9
Book trailer: Lexicon
Also by Max Barry:
Company. Doubleday. 2006.
Jennifer Government. Doubleyday. 2003.
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