The Lost Words: Rediscover our natural world with this spellbinding book

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It is an exploration of the whole range of beautiful musical responses by eight musicians to the art and words of Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane, together with the new spells and paintings that appear in this artefact.

Lizzie, although just eight years older than Esme, is a combination of mother, companion, and maid to Esme, especially once Esme is banished from the Scriptorium for interfering with the work there.

However, the title made me look further and I discovered it's not tragedy porn; it's not even about WWII.

The willow-spell arrived on the towpath of the River Lea, tramping the unglamorous bank-miles between Broxbourne and Tottenham Hale. There were times when she would make a decision or speech and it made no sense to how the character had acted or how she had processed her life experiences up till that point. Esme rescues the word and starts to compile a collection of words that didn’t make it into the dictionary. This is the story of her fictionalised life, but a story embedded in the real history and characters of the OED first edition.Also set in Oxford, during the First World War, two characters from the first novel appear in this one too. With each campaign, we hear about how the book has been used with the children, and the work and conservation action it has inspired in communities,” says Macfarlane, writing in The Guardian: “Access to nature is hugely unevenly distributed across the population, with class, income and ethnicity playing strong determining roles. And so, two years ago, Macfarlane and artist illustrator Jackie Morris embarked on The Lost Words, a ‘spell book’ they hoped might help close the gap between childhood and nature in Britain. Once she was aware of this thievery and old enough to feel how wrong it was, but to still deny herself the opportunities to come forward before she's found out and publicly shamed, further permanently installs her in the foothold of childhood.

The book is being adapted for film, a choral work, a folk album, classical concerts and outdoor theatre; it’s being embroidered in braille and painted on hospital walls. It’s a book to thrill the lover of words, rich with the influences of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dorothy Wordsworth and the metaphorical nature of Old English kennings – the adder has sine-wave swerves, ivy scales are like sky-wire, the kingfisher is colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river’s quiver. Her days are spent being educated at school; her afternoons with the men at the Scriptorium as they collate and pigeonhole and excise the tens of thousands of definitions and attestations through usage that arrive in Dr.most of the literature, manuals, and newspaper articles used as evidence for how words were used, were written by men. Re-enchantment, re-engagement and conservation of the natural world is ultimately only going to be possible if we retain the language with which to make it happen. In writing this novel, Ms Williams has addressed this lack of recognition of women by highlighting the role they played in the production of the dictionary over the fifty years it took to compile. It is about who has power and who has control, not just about what goes into a compilation of words, but in politics and in our lives. Two years on, and my hope is that between us we have a book for all ages, a book that reads aloud to delight the ear, with images that dance in the heart.

Thank you to the author, NetGalley and Random House Ballantyne for my advanced copy in exchange for my always-honest review and for making me appreciate the words, yup the dirty ones too. The Dictionary of Words starts off incredibly strong: We find a little girl, Esme, under a table in Oxford.It was sixth on the list of Australian fiction bestsellers for 2020 [1] and as of 18 January 2021 it had sold more than 100,000 copies. It was shortlisted in 2017 as one of Britain’s favourite books of all time on the natural world (alongside titles including Tarka the Otter and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne).