Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh

Joyous, a shot across the bows . . . writing as rapture, as giddy delight

An astonishing book - funny and moving, playful and shocking. It is what one hopes for in a modern novel, and yet it confounds all expectations. It is complex. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is fiction at its most artful

A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last

Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention

Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark

[The] most exciting of young British writers ... [A] playful word wrangler ... Williams luxuriates in words and wordplay, in definition and precision and invention ... Both main characters are a joy ... Winceworth in particular could have wandered from the pen of Kingsley Amis ... The Liar's Dictionary is a public joy, and Eley Williams a free-spirited literary kook with bags of potential.

a lexicographical delight

A playful delight ... The success of Attrib. had readers keenly awaiting this first novel, and it doesn't disappoint. A virtuoso performance full of charm ... There's great skill in how the novel remains compact and focused while delivering satisfaction on multiple levels. It's simultaneously a love story, an office comedy, a sleuth mystery and a slice of gaslit late Victoriana ... Recalls the early stories of Ali Smith, whose intellectually curious, free-range spirit Williams shares ... Williams keeps in sight big questions about language and identity. But as in Attrib. there's nothing arid about these investigations: this is a novel full of fun. Williams writes with fine comic timing, in prose glinting with goodies ... Throughout, you feel in the safe hands of a storyteller dedicating their talent to our pleasure. The Liar's Dictionary is a glorious novel - a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us.

There are a couple of first novels that I've been intrigued enough by their publicists to set on my personal hope-to-read pile: Eley Williams's The Liar's Dictionary

We are [...] surrounded by Williams's playful prose, with wordplay and portmanteaus aplenty [...] An inventive, comic novel, which has already drawn comparisons to Wodehouse and Waugh

Eley Williams's fiction is all about love, but its style is shy and abashed ... The whydunit strand is nifty: there's a twist I didn't expect. But the pleasures are linguistic. There are numerous digressions into words and their afterlives ... It's fascinating ... The emotional weft is exquisite. Echoes in language, both verbal and body, pass between eras with subtlety. The Liar's Dictionary is a dextrous handling of two mysteries at once: a malfeasance, which ends up solved, and the problem of love, which does not.

Sparkling first lines are things to cherish, and Eley Williams's opener to The Liar's Dictionary is a doozy. "David spoke to me for three minutes without realising I had a whole egg in my mouth". If, like me, that's a sentence that immediately makes you smile, then this is a book for you ... The Liar's Dictionary is a wondrous, multi-faceted novel. It's an absurdist flight of fancy full of funny lines and set pieces that put me in the mind of the films of Wes Anderson. It's also a joyous celebration of language and a touching human story about how people try to leave their mark on the world. Highly recommended.

The Liar's Dictionary takes evident delight in his coinages, and is littered with similar misalignments that don't fully fit the lying label [...] Characteristically nimble and rippling and alert to the uneasiness of "tying things up", despite being a book about books that order and categorise, The Liar's Dictionary lets its characters stray off the page at its close.

Her first novel offers further adventures in love and language, taking us deep into the world of lexicography ...Invented words are her way into those ever-fertile debates about how far language should be fixed or constantly remade ... In Williams's writing, the simple words and actions don't invalidate or override the hesitant, sidelong or circumlocutory ones: she is keen to make room for them all ... A warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence. It's a book of big ideas in a minor key. Sceptical about grand visions, it is also resistant to conclusion.

Eley Williams burst on to the literary scene in 2017 with her beguilingly imaginative collection of tales ... The Liar's Dictionary became one of the hotly anticipated debuts of 2020 ... It does not disappoint ... Really compelling ... Where Williams really excels - other than in the assiduity with which she tests the power of language to articulate the world - is, on the one hand, in affectingly light-touched descriptions of tenderness and love, and, on the other, in the surreal rendering of comic scenes ... A comic tour de force ... Choreographed to perfection ... The intensity of Eley Williams's imaginative vision - her capacity to tease the extraordinary from the ordinary - and her characteristically playful...always warm prose single her out as one of the most promising young British writers to emerge in the last few years.

An unimboxable cheeriosity

A remarkable novel ... Original and often very funny, The Liar's Dictionary is an offbeat exploration of both the delights of language and its limitations.

"A dictionary as an unreliable narrator" is a device used here in clever ways ... Those familiar with Williams's writing won't be surprised to find that her characters are also in love with words ... Williams's sentences rarely stall; they move between conventional and innovative forms, and her novel is no less original for that.

The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams (William Heinemann), which continues the lexicographical playfulness of her short stories, is a singularly charming jeu d'esprit about two people a century apart doing the difficult, essential work of defining words and defining themselves.

[I]t's a sunny, breezy smile of a book [...] it's a lovely, lovely book which we read in a single sitting. If you liked The Surgeon of Crowthorne or even Leonard and Hungry Paul we think you'll get an almighty kick out of this. Max Porter described Williams' debut Attrib, thus "I love it in a way I usually reserve for people" - we feel the same way about The Liar's Dictionary.

With its historical and contemporary settings, rounded relatable characters, and a plot to which one could even give spoilers, [...] The Liar's Dictionary is recognisably a Proper Novel. [...] 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 additionto 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.

[A] wry, charming debut novel ... Ruminating on and revelling in the English language, this warm-hearted novel is a thoughtful, funny delight.

If searching for the answers to human uncertainties by crystallising them in definitions is 'like trapping butterflies under glass,' the beating of Williams' words against the pages is anything but: these words are playfully free.

Filled with humour and sparkling moments of insight, it's a book that celebrates the delights of language whilst the characters struggle to find their place in the world that exists beyond word definitions.