The Naming Song - by Jedediah Berry

About the Book

"There's nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing. When the words went away, the world changed. All meaning was lost, and every border fell. Monsters slipped from dreams to haunt the waking while ghosts wandered the land in futile reveries. Only with the rise of the committees of the named--Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names--could the people stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. They built borders around their world and within their minds, shackled ghosts and hunted monsters, and went to war against the unknown. For one unnamed courier of the Names Committee, the task of delivering new words preserves her place in a world that fears her. But after a series of monstrous attacks on the named, she is forced to flee her committee and seek her long-lost sister"--

Book Synopsis

A gorgeously imaginative fantasy in the spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro.

"The Naming Song understands the fundamental magic of language, and breathes that magic onto every page." --Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestseller

There's nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing

When the words went away, the world changed.

All meaning was lost, and every border fell. Monsters slipped from dreams to haunt the waking while ghosts wandered the land in futile reveries. Only with the rise of the committees of the named--Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names--could the people stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. They built borders around their world and within their minds, shackled ghosts and hunted monsters, and went to war against the unknown.

For one unnamed courier of the Names Committee, the task of delivering new words preserves her place in a world that fears her. But after a series of monstrous attacks on the named, she is forced to flee her committee and seek her long-lost sister. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the shadows, her search for the truth of her past opens the door to a revolutionary future--for the words she carries will reshape the world.

The Naming Song is a book of deep secrets and marvelous discoveries, strange adventures and dangerous truths. It's the story of a world locked in a battle over meaning. Most of all, it's the perfect fantasy for anyone who's ever dreamed of a stranger, freer, more magical world.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award!
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize!

"At the heart of this brilliant, thrilling adventure is an exploration of the power of words to transform the way we see ourselves, our history, and our possible futures. The Naming Song understands the fundamental magic of language, and breathes that magic onto every page." --Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"A breathlessly enjoyable tale." --Cassandra Clare, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sword Catcher

"Every writer, of course, must make magic out of words -- but in The Naming Song Jedediah Berry makes strange and wonderful magic out of the absence of words. This book is a parade of delights and nightmares, written with the kind of incantatory precision that the truest spells are made of." --Kelly Link, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get In Trouble

"The Naming Song is a wonder. A masterful, marvel-filled journey of language and ghosts, of monsters and meaning and mystery. This is a haunting, glorious train ride of a novel that feels both new and old at the same time, a creature of post-apocalyptic myth." --Erin Morgenstern, #1 national bestselling author of The Starless Sea

"Deeply immersive, magnificently imagined, Jedediah Berry's The Naming Song is an epic tale of the fantastic, where language - quite literally - has the power to remake the world. This is a vast and sweeping wonder of a novel." --J. M. Miro, bestselling author of Ordinary Monsters

"Fans of Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or Marie Brennan's Driftwood will be in awe of Berry's (The Manual of Detection) wonderfully odd ode to language, story, and family." --Library Journal, starred review

"With The Naming Song, Jedediah Berry offers a Genesis wrapped up in a Revelation--a mysterious, poetic, and invigorating post-apocalyptic adventure saga about how things can be reborn, and in some cases remade, after they have been undone. It's rare that a novel this substantial is also this strange and this fun." --Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations

"Fantasy readers looking for a fresh and exciting new world to explore will be thrilled." --Publishers Weekly

"Berry creates both a familiar and unfamiliar landscape in a sweeping epic about the language and love between us, the humanity of the living and the dead, and the raw power of creation." --J. R. Dawson, author of The First Bright Thing

"In Jedediah Berry's The Naming Song I perceive the simplicity and complexity of Richard Brautigan's Watermelon Sugar, a structure that could have been borrowed from Berry's own card game, The Family Arcana, and a nod to The Romance of the Rose. Still, it's wholly its own engaging creature that engenders wonder and suggests a new kind of fiction." --Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy Award-winning author

"An anti-totalitarian, post-apocalyptic fable featuring mystical theater trains, impossible monsters, and the awesome power of story? Sign me the heck up. If we can rise against injustice even half as boldly as "the courier" and her friends, there might just be hope for humanity yet. Jedediah Berry has delivered a true epic, thrumming with life." --GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and The Lumberjack's Dove

"The Naming Song is not just one of the best told fantasy novels of the last twenty-five years, it is a masterpiece of storytelling destined to be extolled as a classic." --Howard Andrew Jones, author of Lord of a Shattered Land and The Desert of Souls

"Jedediah Berry's The Naming Song brings the reader as close to magic as they are likely to ever get. Berry, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain M. Banks, or John Crowley picks up words at a different angle . . . and brings a whole new world to light. Every page is play." --Gavin Grant, Book Moon Books

About the Author

Jedediah Berry is the critically acclaimed author of The Naming Song, The Manual of Detection, and a story in cards, The Family Arcana. He lives in Western Massachusetts. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes.