In Williams's comically inventive debut novel (after the collection Attrib.), a woman must ferret out the falsities intentionally embedded in a dictionary. Mallory, the sole employee of David Swansby at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, spends her days fielding angry, elliptical bomb threats from an unidentified crackpot. Then, one day, Swansby gives her a special assignment--to find all the mountweazels placed in his family's dictionary over the years. (A mountweazel is a fake word placed in reference works to protect against copyright infringement.) Williams flashes back to 1899, when Swansby's is a bustling enterprise that employs many lexicographers, among them Peter Winceworth, who loves to dream up mountweazels ("relectoblivious (adj.), accidentally rereading a phrase or line due to lack of focus or desire to finish"). Mallory and her lover, Pip, search for these fake words and try to ascertain the identity of the anonymous mountweazeler, while in a parallel narrative Winceworth falls frustratingly in love with a fellow lexicographer's fiancée, leading to two surprising and emotionally satisfying conclusions. The author combines a Nabokovian love of wordplay with an Ali Smith--like ability to create eccentric characters who will take up permanent residence in the reader's heart. This is a sheer delight for word lovers. (Jan.)

DEBUT NOVEL Williams's (Attrib. and Other Stories) first novel offers up a delicious love letter to language that readers of a sympathetic palate will devour. Following a Dorian Gray-like prolog of insights about dictionaries and the people who love them, the novel alternates between two London-based lexicographers a century apart. Back in 1899, the hapless Peter Winceworth toils away at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary in bored anonymity, speaking with an affected lisp and infatuated with the fiancée of his coworker and archnemesis. He finds his pleasures by inserting scores of mountweazels--fake words--into the dictionary-in-progress, assuming nobody will ever see them yet reveling in the possibility that somebody might. That person is Mallory, now an intern at the same dictionary looking to digitize its long-delayed second edition when she isn't fielding phone calls by somebody threatening to blow up the building. Her partner in rooting out the mountweazels is her "flatmate" Pip, whom Mallory adores but is incapable of introducing publicly as her girlfriend, and together they try to uncover the identity of this lexical vandal. Buried beneath the torrents of puns and linguistic riffing is a story about two people from different eras connected by the thread of language, free to invent and repurpose words as they please, but who are less adept at navigating that far more indefinable terrain: the human heart. VERDICT Expect sharply divided opinions here, but devoted fans of Ali Smith will gleefully succumb to Williams's tale of acrobatic wordplay.--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Steampunk meets philology in a century-hopping debut novel. A pair of budding lexicographers working on the same dictionary, one at the end of the 19th century and the other at the beginning of the 21st, alternate chapters and narratives in this confection of love and language. Winceworth, a neurotic young editor with an affected lisp, is working on the S section of Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, then a flourishing enterprise. Meanwhile, more than a century later, Mallory takes an internship at what's left of the dictionary: cases of blue index cards covered with definitions housed in a magnificent, crumbling Victorian building on a prime block of London. In between their eras, World War I stopped the dictionary in its tracks, sending the young workers off to the trenches and melting down the printing presses for ammunition; the entries for Z remain unfinished. In her half of the novel, Mallory performs the disturbing twin assignments of fielding threatening phone calls and hunting down "mountweazels"--made-up words deliberately inserted into the dictionary. In his half, Winceworth broods over office politics and invents the words that Mallory is rooting out. Williams, a charming stylist, is at her best when she's writing breathlessly about the blossoming of romantic love: Mallory's for her girlfriend and Winceworth's for a colleague's fiancee. Plentiful events--explosions, trysts, betrayals--give the impression of a lively plot, though key mysteries remain unresolved, particularly in Winceworth's narrative. (What is the real identity of the mysterious beauty? What is the bully's motive?) Surprisingly, the least exciting aspect of the novel is the vocabulary words, many of which word mavens may well already have encountered in listicles of, for example, color terms or names for body parts (glabella, philtrum, pons). Nevertheless, people who read dictionaries for fun will likely enjoy the selection. A sweet and diverting story, witty and sincere, from a promising newcomer. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Peter Winceworth is a lexicographer at Swansby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary in its nineteenth-century heyday, struggling his way through entries for the letter S while being largely ignored by his colleagues. His disdain for his situation, particularly his dislike of his flashy, ne'er-do-well colleague Terence Frasham, simmers until he boils over in private rebellion by inserting his own fabricated words into the dictionary, like "winceworthliness (n.), the value of idle pursuit." His illicit additions aren't uncovered until more than a century later. Mallory is an intern at Swansby's, much diminished since Winceworth's time and noted now primarily for being incomplete. She is responsible for answering the peculiar threatening calls (do definitions matter that much?) that arrive every day. As Mallory hunts for Winceworth's entries, the threats reach a climax that threatens the legacy of the dictionary. Although separated by time, Winceworth and Mallory share a zest for the precision of the right word and a tendency to harbor their own secrets. The Liar's Dictionary, while prone to detours through esoteric linguistic explorations, will nonetheless amuse word lovers intrigued by the pair's unusual exploits.