Speak - Hardcover

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

“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