Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth
Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again
property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this
world, Earth's wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which
the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of
families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all
the galaxies' languages. The linguists wield power, but live in
isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class
warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of
men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her
family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the
government, supervising the children's language education in the
Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and
caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren
House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to
die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine
revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word,
women are creating a language of their own to free them of men's
domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the
language is ready for use. The women's language, Laadan, is only
one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original
novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging
meditations on the tensions between freedom and control,
individuals and communities, thought and action.
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