Speak

“ Everything you could want in a story is here: courage and cowardice, lust and devotion, sickness and health, partings and death, better and worse. Speak is a novel that calls to the reader in many voices, harnessed to one distinct and singular imagination— Louisa Hall’ s. Turn to page one and be amazed. ” — Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
In a narrative that spans geography and time, told from the perspectives of five very different characters, Speak considers what it means to be human, and what it means to be less than fully alive. A Puritan woman freshly arrived in the New World, mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, a computer science professor, a young girl, and a former Silicon Valley wunderkind now in prison are all attempting to communicate . . . with estranged spouses, lost friends, future readers, or a computer program that may or may not understand them. Although each speaks from a distinct place and moment in time, they all share the need to express themselves while simultaneously wondering if they will ever be heard, or understood.
In dazzling and electrifying prose, Louisa Hall explores how the chasm between computer and human— shrinking rapidly with today’ s technological advances— echoes the gaps that exist between ordinary people.
“ Speak is that rarest of finds: a novel that doesn’ t remind me of any other book I’ ve ever read. A complex, nuanced, and beautifully written meditation on language, immortality, the nature of memory, the ethical problems of artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human. ” — Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven