Speak: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Because of Speak’s structure, it will draw comparisons to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas—but that’s selling both authors a little short. Speak is told from multiple points of view, mostly through letters and transcripts, but the voices accrue to present a profound and illuminating whole. This is a smart book, and Louisa Hall is tackling some big questions, namely what does it mean to be human? She builds her novel with characters collected through time—from an early pilgrim trapped in an unhappy marriage, to Alan Turing writing letters to a friend’s mother, to a 2040 Silicon Valley prodigy incarcerated for designing a “babybot” with illegal levels of artificial intelligence—and by doing so she draws out the shrinking gap that separates us (for now) from our rapidly encroaching technology, as well as the gaps that have always existed between us. This is a sensitive, beautiful, and timely novel that measures our very human need to speak against our possibly more vital need to be heard. Put down your phone for a while and read it. – Chris Schluep