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Lexicon

On sale

20th June 2013

Price: £9.99

Alex Award, 2014

Select a format

Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9781444764673

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Sticks and stones break bones.
Words kill.

They recruited Emily from the streets. They said it was because she’s good with words.

They’ll live to regret it.

Wil survived something he shouldn’t have. But he doesn’t remember it.

Now they’re after him and he doesn’t know why.

There’s a word, they say. It shouldn’t have got out. But it did.

And they want it back…

Find out why in one of the most mind-bending, page-turning, thrilling novels you’ll ever read.


*Winner of the Aurealis Award for science fiction and GoodReads Choice Awards finalist for best science fiction*

Reviews

SFX
Brilliantly realised... strikingly relevant... a resounding success
Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
Gripping... a pitch-perfect thriller, a jetpack of a plot that rocketed me from page one to page 400 in a single afternoon
Australian
Truly original... a crack-paced thriller... smart and tons of fun
Guardian
A spellbinding, intelligent read...a freewheeling plot intermeshed with linguistic theory and some genuinely creepy horror set-pieces
Booktopia
Dazzling...An intelligent, raw thriller from one of Australia's finest
SciFi Now
Highly entertaining and engrossing... characters that are both complicated and likeable
Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls and Zoo City
Insanely good. Dark and twisted and sweet and humane all at once.
io9.com
Crazily inventive...Barry's smartest dystopia yet
Hugh Howey, bestselling author of Wool
Best thing I've read in a long, long time... a masterpiece
Time Out New York
Sophisticated and laden with subtext... clearly reaffirms Barry's status as a gifted purveyor of suspense
National
Wonderfully crafted, dark yet humorous, fast-paced and tragic in turn
Lev Grossman, <i>Time</i>
An extraordinarily fast, funny, cerebral thriller
Vogue
Delightfully high-concept...think Noam Chomsky meets Christopher Nolan
M.R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts
Dazzling and spectacularly inventive. A novel that jams itself sideways into your brain and stays there.
Shelf Awareness
Mind-bending...an action novel that nicely exercises the brain as well as the heart rate
Associated Press
A strange combination of romance, thriller and science fiction... The words brilliant and exemplary aren't adequate enough to convey the amazing craft of LEXICON.
Time
The year's smartest thriller