Author Payal Kapadia returns with gripping fantasy adventure on freedom of speakers

New Delhi, Jul 18 (PTI) Crossword Award–winning author Payal Kapadia is set to return with "Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words", a fantasy adventure where words come at a price and so does the freedom to speak them.

Touted to be a compelling cry for the freedom of speakers and their words, the book, published by Hachette India, melds fantasy and magical realism to voice the most urgent questions of our times: How do we think, feel, imagine or remember when the words are missing? or in a toss-up between freedom and survival, what wins? The book is slated to release on Friday.

"This started out as a tiny book about a world in which the words are fading. But then I started thinking about the Speakers. All around me, I began to find those who don’t have the freedom to tell their own stories. And suddenly, my story grew wings. I saw, with a terrifying exhilaration, that this was a book about our own world," said Kapadia in a statement.

So, in prose both eloquent and spare, the book is a tale of six desperate Words, two fearless Speakers and one audacious quest to reclaim the truth.

It is set in a world where one must pay a price to speak, Speakers have to buy words to use them. And at the click of a button, the flesh-and-ink words at a warehouse are boxed and shipped to stay alive.

However, everything changes when 15-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," reads the description of the book.

According to the publishers, the book is "wildly inventive, grand in its sweep, deep in its reach, dark and yet possessed of a defiant, luminous heart".

"Kapadia has created an immersive and astonishingly real universe around that very important thing that sets us apart as human – words," said Vatsala Kaul Banerjee, publisher of children's and young adult books at Hachette India.

Besides her debut novella "Wisha Wozzariter", which won the 2013 Crossword Book Award for Children's Writing, Kapadia's previously authored books include "Horrid High" series; "Colonel Hathi Loses His Brigade" and "Twice Upon a Time". PTI MG MAH MAH