The Word Exchange

A thrilling, inventive debut novel about a society in which intuitive devices are spreading a "word flu" epidemic and people are disappearing from the dictionary.
   Anana Johnson and her father Doug work at the North American Dictionary of the English Language, where they are producing the last edition of the dictionary that will ever be printed--bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are all things of the past in this world. Doug is a staunchly anti-tech intellectual, with a particular ire for the handheld Meme devices that have replaced print. Memes not only keep us in constant communication with our friends and family, but also have become so intuitive that they order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach and even create and sell language in a marketplace called the Word Exchange. One evening, going to meet her father at the Dictionary offices, Anana finds that he has suddenly, thoroughly vanished--not only from his desk, but from the dictionary itself. Anana's search for her father and tenuous alliance with an underground resistance of former wordsmiths is complicated by the spread of word flu, a virus that causes people to gradually lose their vocabularies until they need their Memes to remember even ordinary words like "lever" and "rotten".