RaveThe QuietusThe Liar’s Dictionary is Williams’ first novel, following the justly-acclaimed 2017 collection of short stories Attrib., and while fans of that book certainly won’t be disappointed with this one, they will find something rather different here. The Liar’s Dictionary begins in a familiar way with a preface which talks about what dictionaries are, can be, and could do. It addresses ‘you’ directly, it draws attention to itself as a physical object, it puns and plays and invites you to wonder. The preface draws on Italo Calvino and Ali Smith, and adds wonderfully to their legacy ... Even if [...] definitions reveal themselves as slippery things, dictionaries are an attempt to hold, and a way of choosing to do so. The tricky courtship of word and world, and how a book might hold a world, is essentially the theme of all dictionary fiction. The Liar’s Dictionary, an invaluable addition to that odd canon, ends up – I think – being all about one word, one that James Joyce (an encyclopaediac himself) called \'the word known to all,\' the word love.