Top

Apex Hides the Hurt

On sale

1st March 2018

Price: £8.99

Select a format

Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780708898758

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

This New York Times Notable Book from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad is a brisk, comic tour de force about identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry.

The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant.

And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well.

Reviews

New York Review of Books
A brilliant, witty, and subtle novel, written in a most engaging style, with tremendous aptness of language and command of plot
New York Times
Brilliant. . . . Exhilarating. . . . What keeps you reading this critique of language is its language, and our perverse delight in the ingenious abuse of words