The Dictionary of Lost Words
by Pip Williams
Buy on AmazonEsme 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 Oxford English Dictionary. 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.…
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"Writing a novel about words is a tricky business, ripe for accusations of pretentiousness. How has a debut novelist managed? I think there’s only one phrase for it and that’s ‘with love’. Pip Williams writes with such love. The Dictionary of Lost Words is the kindest book you’re ever likely to read. But don’t mistake me. Pip Williams’s kindness isn’t of the sweetly insipid variety. Rigorous, full of insights and honesty, always avoiding the stereotype and the obvious ploy, we’re with a writer whose gentle authority touches places that flashier novels never quite reach (to coin a phrase). This isn’t luck. The Dictionary of Lost Words is as carefully constructed as the Oxford English Dictionary whose creation is the novel’s setting. Notice the way Pip Williams moves Esme’s story along, with just enough time to absorb but no dwelling where there’s no need to dwell. And Esme’s story is an important one. Lost words, usually women’s words, need to be found. In this novel we find them, and a great deal more besides."
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist · fivebooks.com