Cover of The Dictionary of Lost Words
Read Time: ~6.7 hr

The Dictionary of Lost Words

by Pip Williams (2020)

About this book

Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a hidden history lost between the lines. Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.

Setting / LocationOxford, England
Story EraLate 19th & Early 20th Century
Protagonist / CoreEsme Nicoll (Lexicographer's Daughter)

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

Cover of The Dictionary of Lost Words

The Dictionary of Lost Words

Pip Williams

Growing up beneath the sorting table of the original Oxford English Dictionary in Victorian Oxford, young Esme collects discarded slips of words relating to women's daily labor and domestic lives.

Cover of Remarkable Creatures

Remarkable Creatures

Tracy Chevalier

In the windswept coastal town of Lyme Regis, Mary Anning hunts for sea monsters in the jagged cliffs. When she uncovers the fossilized skeleton of an unknown creature, she rocks the scientific world. Alongside Elizabeth Philpot, an intelligent spinster with an eye for fossilized fish, Mary challenges the scientific establishment of 19th-century Britain.

Cover of Funeral in blue

Funeral in blue

Anne Perry

In her haunting new Victorian novel, Anne Perry brings to rich and passionate life the city that she has made her own. Once more she shares the intimacy of London's opulent drawing rooms and guides readers through gaslit thoroughfares that echo with hooves on cobblestones, the cries of street vendors, the shouts of newsboys reporting the headlines . . . of two beautiful women found strangled in the studio of a well-known London artist. One of the victims is the wife of Hester Monk's colleague, surgeon Dr. Kristian Beck, a Viennese emigre who swiftly becomes the principal suspect. Now investigator William Monk and his wife seek evidence to save Beck from the hangman, hoping to penetrate not only the mystery of Elissa Beck's death, but the riddle of her life. . . .

Cover of The Essex Serpent

The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry

Set in 1890s England, The Essex Serpent follows London widow Cora Seaborne. Following the death of her abusive husband, Cora decamps to rural Essex with an interest in natural history. When rumors spread that a mythical winged monster has returned from the coastal marshes, Cora forms an intense bond with the local parish vicar Will Ransome.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams | Literally Just Books