I had great hopes for this book. I read what may have been the first chapter all about prefaces and was bored out of my mind. Why would anyone stick with this?

Playfully, intelligently, this book emphasizes that we're all toting around our own personal dictionaries based off our own experiences, our own lives, and that's a fun concept for a word lover to contemplate: the idea that there's individual agency to be wrested free from language no matter who you are, what time period you hail from, or where you live and breathe.

I liked the thematic resonance of that. The universal 'thwack,' so to speak.

Moreover, I also appreciated the notion of immortalizing oneself through words, because that's precisely what Winceworth does. Cynical, bored, disillusioned about his seemingly 'invisible' status at work as well as in life, he spends his 19th century days adding random entries into Swansby's New Encylcopedic Dictionary, knowing full well that someday someone will stumble across his litany of false entries and question them, effectively leaving his mark for the foreseeable future. It just so happens that Mallory is tasked with rooting out these "mountweazels" as they move toward digitization of the dictionary in the present day. What follows is a hunt that requires research, that asks for definitions of every word, and perhaps some insight into why Winceworth included these fake words in the first place.

The beginning's a little slow, a little dense, I'll grant you that. Otherwise it's whimsical, clever, endearing, and not half as pretentious as you'd expect a book about dictionaries to be. To be frank: there are linguistic delights as far and as fast as your eyes can read!

Thank you NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the ARC!

Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is famously incomplete. In 1899, Winceworth is one of its legion of lexicographers. By the present day, intern Mallory is the lone employee of the last Swansby heir. Winceworth contends with oafish coworkers, tedium, and maintaining his affected lisp. Mallory's job is mainly ferreting out all the mountweazels (invented words snuck in as copyright protection), though she also fields daily bomb threats from a bigot offended that she redefined marriage. Then each has a bizarre, calamitous, life-altering day. Both stories are loving paeons to the absurd invention that is language. Mallory's tale is far more grounded and affecting, though.

This was not the book for me. I found it pompous, difficult to delve into, and lacking in plot development. Hard pass.

I like books that make you think, but even I found this book dull. A little more story and a little less trying to impress. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary manages to do new things with some of the preoccupations of recent innovative novelists. For example, her book joins a surprising number of recent alphabetically arranged novels, such as, to name just examples available in English, Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, and the encyclopædic final section of David Grossman’s See Under: Love.

Again, Williams’ plot hinges, in a satisfyingly complex way, upon deliberate false entries in the dictionary, reminiscent of the false passages in the books at the centers of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon. One of her protagonists is tasked with eliminating these entries from a dictionary, much as the character Cinoc, in Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual works as a dictionary’s “word-killer,” though he targets obsolete rather than fake words. Since Williams’ novel, more than these others, is all about, and frequently composed of, rare and unusual words, her employment of these themes is particularly appropriate, and she is able to apply them in distinctive ways.

Though Williams’ chapter headings, starting with “A is for artful (adj.),” stress the alphabetical structure, the novel’s binary structure—alternating chapters set in the present and 1899—is more crucial and highly effective. The counterpointed relationships between the two stories—present/past, female/male, gay/straight, upstairs/downstairs and so on—which take place in the same institution and building, make for an absorbing and moving dual narrative.

Without resorting to supernatural connections, Williams sets up subtle links between her present and past characters. In an old photograph taken outside the building, Mallory, the modern protagonist, notes that her predecessor “must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.” Although she is sitting with her romantic partner at the time, Mallory “propped the photograph in the centre of [her] desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.” Similarly, her 1899 counterpart presciently imagines that “some poor clerk or printer’s devil” might in “five years? Ten years? A hundred?” be “tasked with winnowing out these entries,” just as Mallory has been.

In addition to the unusual words which appear in the fictional dictionary, the novel itself makes abundant use of a delightfully florid vocabulary. Language lovers will want to keep the OED handy as they learn to use such terms as “zarf,” “vulning,” and “apricide.” As you might expect from her linguistic enthusiasm, Williams has a knack for devising charmingly unexpected turns of phrase, such as “If ever a songbird was designed to glare, Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s specimen was that bird” or “It tasted of soap used by a despot with a secret.” Nevertheless, The Liar’s Dictionary is not just a showcase for its author’s linguistic ingenuity. Its affecting characterizations, its absorbing plot, and even its vivid evocation of the largely forgotten but deadly 1899 explosion at Barking have much to offer the reader.


Here are a few tiny editing suggestions for the final printing. One pointlessly run-on sentence needs to be corrected: “One of the figures in the photograph had his whole face blurred there was just a feathered smudge of paleness.” The comma should be deleted in “When the boy with the post-barrow, came to take the index cards.” I would recommend changing the obsolete alternative spelling “cameleopard” each time it appears to the more standard “camelopard,” though I suppose the author could make a case for leaving it.

Terribly twee even for me, and I'm a bespectacled and tweed-encrusted academic who's rather enamored of erudite wordplay, linguistic parlor games, and cryptic crosswords. Emotionally insubstantial and besotted with its own cleverness, and only readable in small doses..

Yay! Yay! Yay!

I wish the above three words could be my full review but maybe I can spend a little time explaining why this novel made me want to jump up and down and then take the novel straight to my book club so they can read it too (which I would have done, in pre-covid days; today I'll need to email them about it). The Liar's Dictionary is so entertaining, so riveting, and above all so attentive to language, that reading it felt like I was in the presence of a virtuoso performer of an instrument called Language. Williams set an audacious goal for herself, here, when she made the underlying premise of her novel be the search for precision in language/meaning. With this as her premise, she needed to write in a narrative voice equal to the task--to write in precisely the right words, one after the other. Her narrator is a fascinating, perceptive, big-hearted logophile. I loved spending time with her! This novel may be a delightful comedy, but the language is breathtakingly precise. It's surprising in its incisiveness and nuance, and it's this attentiveness that makes the novel such a delight to read.

Eley Williams' debut novel The Liar's Dictionary is the most laugh-out-loud book I've read in ages. The dual timeline stories of Mallory and Winceworth wrestling with the meaning and meaninglessness of a epically doomed dictionary a hundred years apart is the setting for some ingenious wordplay that brought back reading Thurber as a child. The humor and absurdity reminded me of Tom Sharpe's satirical novels. Winceworth, a disenfranchised and self-made butt of jokes, hurls coded messages in a dictionary towards an unsuspecting and underpaid intern in the future. Mallory tasked with finding and rooting out these made up words ('aren't all words made up?') highlights how being a working-stiff hasn't changed much in a hundred years. Whether you think you care about the beauty and absurdity of words or not, this novel will make you appreciate the impossibility and improbability that any dictionary has ever been "finished."

The Liars dictionary is an amazing visually descriptive book about lexicongraphers from two different time periods. Two different people working on the same dictionary Peter Winceworth and Mallory. Peter Winceworth has a lisp and kind of gets bullied for it. ( he is an Lexicongrapher at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Although when Mallory is working on Digitzing the Dictionary she finds out there is a lot more issues. For your brain to think like a lexicographer is quite amazing. File here sort there for later information. This is a strongly written book right away and the character building is straightaway. There are definitions in each chapter which I think is pretty amazing.

Huge feast for bookworms! I hung onto pretty much everyword.
This was Arc was given to me by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Set at the Swansby’s Encyclopedic Dictionary office building in London, two people, over a century apart, try to make sense of the world through their first love, words.

Winceworth, a Victorian gentleman wannabe and lexicographer is creating mountweazels (fake definition entries) to stave off boredom, and to help define and describe his life. In modern London, Mallory, a long term intern living with her barista girlfriend is assigned the task of finding Winceworth’s words and removing them before the dictionary is published online. And she fields daily threatening phone calls to the business.

As the story progresses from chapters A to Z, the alternating narratives show the growths of Winceworth and Mallory.

This is a meaningful book, disguised in lightheartedness. After all, life needs laughter to create meaning. And intrigue, a bit of gossip, and cats named Tits.

The characters are created beautifully, the writing is clever but also serious. I very much enjoyed this book, and admire Williams’ writing style. This is a book I would read again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for the ARC.

also reviewed here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3416726591

The modern sections of this were fabulous, but the older ones were dull and confusing. Ultimately, I didn't finish the book.

I couldn't finish this. Not enough plot and too much discussion of word definitions. I'm a word nerd, but this was just too much.

Creating a dictionary at the end of the 19th century was no easy task--dozens of workers toiled away, traveling and researching to write meticulous definitions on index cards they collected as they worked through all the words one letter at a time. In The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams, Peter Winceworth labors at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, so bored with his job and life that he fabricates a lisp to provoke his co-workers as he tackles the letter S. He also enjoys making up words to counter the tedium (i.e. relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish) and secretly inserts them into the book. Flash forward to modern-day London, we find Mallory similarly toiling in boredom at the same Swansby’s trying to find all of Winceworth’s mountweazels (it’s a word...look it up) before her boss finally publishes Swansby’s online. The action moves back and forth between the two characters as they navigate their way through the dictionary and a strange few days of their lives.
The Liar’s Dictionary is about love, creativity, and finding yourself, but first and foremost it is an homage to words and the people who love them. Nearly every paragraph includes an interesting and obscure word, the characters (both modern and not) banter with funny references and pun-filled witticism and the action revolves around the words themselves. If wordplay, British humor, or the need to look up definitions every few minutes will make you crazy, then this may not be the book for you--but at a slim 200 pages, it may work for almost anyone. I adored every minute of it and highly recommend it.