Book of the Week

In Speak, Louisa Hall entwines multiple viewpoints in a constantly shifting narrative about what makes us truly human.

Spanning a pilgrim girl’s diary from 1663, to the 2040 prison confession of a computer programmer who invented a doll so realistic that the children who played with it forgot to socialise, and taking in the letters of Alan Turing and the transcripts of a quarantined girl conversing with a robot, it is a complex, wide-ranging novel. P

osing questions, never judging, it holds a mirror up to our increasingly digital lives, and explores whether artificial intelligence will divorce us from our humanity or whether it has a redemptive power to return us to ourselves.

In the voices of her many characters, in her dazzling array of symbols, and in exploring some of the most pertinent ideas of our time, this is a unique, important and remarkable book.