Six desperate Words.
Two fearless Speakers.
One audacious quest to reclaim the truth,
if such a thing can still be found.
In a world where you must pay a price to speak, Speakers have to buy words to use them. At the click of a button, the flesh-and-ink Words at a warehouse are boxed and shipped to stay alive.
Everything changes when fifteen-year-olds Asha and Zeb break the rules and graffiti a wall. They collide head-on with the tyrannical Word Bloc and its sinister leader Gunther Glib. For him, power is about controlling what can be said, even if it means destroying the Words and forever silencing their Speakers.
In a losing battle, a dying Word urges her friends to escape to the forgotten Wood the Words first came from. As the paths of the Words and their Speakers intersect, they embark on an epic journey to fight a brutal regime and find what they stand for.
A startling, scorching blaze of an adventure from Crossword Award-winning author Payal Kapadia, Woebegone's Warehouse of Words is a compelling cry for the freedom of speakers, and their words.
'The Hunger Games meet Fahrenheit 451' - SOMAN CHAINANI, author, The School for Good and Evil
Review
'This gripping odyssey about the power of words underscores the importance of free speech in a chilling dystopian world. Bold, lyrical and fast-paced, this is a must-read for fans of science fiction and speculative fiction. A timeless tale of resilience against oppression.' - SOMAN CHAINANI, author, The School for Good and Evil
'Dystopian reality fiction - has Payal Kapadia just created a whole new genre? This book is a thing of beauty and will hold true forever. Deeply political, frighteningly relevant.'- PARO ANAND, author and winner of the Sahitya Akademi Bal Sahitya Puraskar
'A tale of now, of our always-on age of Google-paedia, where the past is being constantly revised.'- ADRIAN LEVY, Emmy Award-winning journalist and author
'Audacious! Bold! Compelling! A powerful reminder that words and stories matter. A timely tale of freedom, courage and the joy of wordplay.'- BIJAL VACHHARAJANI, author
'Snatches of 1984 and echoes of The Dictionary of Lost Words. Fluid writing, winsome characters and meticulous world-building. This will make readers think long and hard about the possibilities.'- JANE DE SUZA, author
About the Author
Payal Kapadia loves words for the stories they tell, even more for the stories they carry inside them. She studied English Literature at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and earned an MSc degree (Journalism) from Northwestern University. Writing for news outlets in the USA, Hong Kong, Japan and India, she was drawn to offbeat tales of unsung heroes and lost causes: a painting pachyderm; the last Japanese soldiers of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army; and historic homes going under the hammer.
Her debut novella Wisha Wozzariter won the 2013 Crossword Book Award for Children's Writing and features in the 101 Indian Children's
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