The Silicon Tongue

The Silicon Tongue follows the award-winning novel, The Word Burners and critically acclaimed novel, The Iron Mouth. These novels explore the relationship between language and identity and tell stories of women’s lives in a time of radical social change. The Silicon Tongue is centred on the life and times of London-born Alice who was brought to New Zealand as a servant in the 1930s. Tricked by the authorities into believing she was an orphan, Alice tells her story into the tape recorder of a mysterious oral historian and discloses family secrets of rape and adoption. She discovers a kinship with a teenage nethead called Pixel and learns that old women can fly in cyberspace along with the young. Meanwhile, Alice’s daughter Joy finds out that when it comes to family stories there is always more than one version of the truth.