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Woebegone's Warehouse of Words: A Gripping, Unputdownable Fantasy Adventure by the Bestselling Winner of the Crossword Award, in Stunning Deluxe Hardback with Gold Foil and Stained Edges (Limited Edition)

Payal Kapadia

Six desperate Words.

Two fearless Speakers.

One audacious quest to reclaim the truth,

if such a thing can still be found.

In a world where you must pay a price to speak, Speakers have to buy words to use them. At the click of a button, the flesh-and-ink Words at a warehouse are boxed and shipped to stay alive.

Everything changes when fifteen-year-olds Asha and Zeb break the rules and graffiti a wall. They collide head-on with the tyrannical Word Bloc and its sinister leader Gunther Glib. For him, power is about controlling what can be said, even if it means destroying the Words and forever silencing their Speakers.

In a losing battle, a dying Word urges her friends to escape to the forgotten Wood the Words first came from. As the paths of the Words and their Speakers intersect, they embark on an epic journey to fight a brutal regime and find what they stand for.

A startling, scorching blaze of an adventure from Crossword Award–winning author Payal Kapadia, Woebegone's Warehouse of Words is a compelling cry for the freedom of speakers, and their words.

'The Hunger Games meet Fahrenheit 451' – SOMAN CHAINANI, author, The School for Good and Evil

  • Classification : General & Literary Fiction
  • Pub Date : JUL 19, 2024
  • Imprint : Hachette India
  • Page Extent : 304
  • Binding : HB
  • ISBN : 9789357317122
  • Price : INR 799
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Payal Kapadia

Payal Kapadia loves words for the stories they tell, even more for the stories they carry inside them. She studied English Literature at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and earned an MSc degree (Journalism) from Northwestern University. Writing for news outlets in the USA, Hong Kong, Japan and India, she was drawn to offbeat tales of unsung heroes and lost causes: a painting pachyderm; the last Japanese soldiers of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army; and historic homes going under the hammer.

Her debut novella Wisha Wozzariter won the 2013 Crossword Book Award for Children's Writing and features in the 101 Indian Children's Books We Love! compilation. Her bestselling books include the well-loved Horrid High series, a children's biography of B.R. Ambedkar, Twice Upon a Time and Maidless in Mumbai.

Payal now lives somewhere in Mumbai, in a flat among flats in a high-rise among high-rises on a street among streets. But she can see the sea from her window and sometimes it is big enough to swallow the sky and the clouds tumble into it.

On those days, she writes.

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