Eddie Robson’s Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a locked room mystery in a near future world of politics and alien diplomacy.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, which is out June 28th 2022.
Lydia works as translator for the Logi cultural attaché to Earth. They work well together, even if the act of translating his thoughts into English makes her somewhat wobbly on her feet. She’s not the agency’s best translator, but what else is she going to do? She has no qualifications, and no discernible talent in any other field.
So when tragedy strikes, and Lydia finds herself at the center of an intergalactic incident, her future employment prospects look dire–that is, if she can keep herself out of jail!
But Lydia soon discovers that help can appear from the most unexpected source…
Fitz’s study was one of the largest rooms in the old brownstone house, all done out with fitted mahogany bookcases that had been here long before the building had been acquired for use as the cultural attaché’s residence. Many of the shelves didn’t fit his books, because Logi books tended to be taller and wider than books made on Earth, but he’d filled the smaller shelves with books accumulated while living here: books in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, Urdu, Portuguese, Russian, German and more. (The concept of one species on one planet speaking so many different languages fascinated him—the Logi’s own language had slipped into standardization long ago—and his lack of progress with learning to read human languages was due to his inability to focus on one at a time.) He had a desk by the window and a long, deep sofa against the back wall. There was little space for pictures, but the area above the sofa was filled with a morphing canvas he’d brought with him from Logia, which generated images based on the mood of the room—it responded to Logi, but also to humans who could speak Logisi. At that moment it displayed a sunrise on Logia. Sometimes it showed Fitz’s family and friends back home, sometimes spectacular vistas, sometimes phrases in Logisi which Lydia couldn’t read but suspected might be motivational slogans. One time she entered the study looking for him and he wasn’t there and the canvas was displaying what looked very much like erotica. She was too embarrassed to mention it and could never decide whether it had anything to do with Fitz or if whatever intelligence drove the canvas had a mischievous side. Lydia knew little about their technology— not through ignorance on her part, the Logi were careful not to bring too much of it to Earth or explain how it worked, and had complicated protocols about this—but she understood much of it was organic and could, in some sense, think.
Fitz was on the sofa, reading a coffee-table book of Scandinavian landscapes, holding it easily in one huge hand, fingers splayed to support its four corners. He closed the book, put it to one side and gestured for Lydia to sit in the high-backed padded chair. It was designed for someone of Fitz’s height and Lydia always found her legs dangled down, making her feel like a small child sitting in Daddy’s office (not that she had ever actually done that). She sat on it cross-legged in the hope this would make her look very slightly less foolish.
Lydia was going to start by apologizing to him. But then he apologized to her instead. He’d put her under too much strain, he said. Expecting her to translate the entire play for him and cope with the reception afterwards, at the end of such a busy week, was too much. He should have scheduled more time off during the festival and departed the reception earlier.
No no, Lydia replied. I was totally up for it and I—
But Fitz just held up a hand and said, I’ve taken full responsibility for what happened.
Lydia wasn’t sure he could do that, legally, if Anders pressed charges. What about the bloke I punched? Is he happy with that?
I’ve told him I’ll sponsor his event.
His devised theater thing?
Yes.
Oh. Sorry.
It’s fine. It sounds quite worthwhile.
So he’s not going to take it any—
No.
This was all being presented to her very lightly, but Lydia knew Fitz had put himself on the line for her and she wasn’t sure she dserved it. But he genuinely wasn’t angry: She’d have known if he was. It was impossible for him to outright lie to her in that way, and vice versa for that matter: their true feelings would always filter through.
I saw someone from the embassy was here, she said.
Yes. Her name’s Madison. When Fitz said this, Lydia realized he’d mentioned her before—possibly not by name, but there was a tang of animosity she definitely recognized from previous conversations about his dealings with a colleague. He didn’t always have to use someone’s name for Lydia to know who he was talking about.
Was she very cross?
Fitz flexed his fingers in what Lydia had come to recognize as a dismissive gesture. Madison and I have never got on. She thinks I let myself be influenced too much; I think being influenced is an essential part of my job. She’s using this incident to lobby for me to be reassigned. This isn’t really about you.
This made Lydia feel worse. You mean I could have got you fired?
His fingers flexed again, faster this time. No no. There was never any danger of that.
Lydia looked up at the canvas. It had changed to an abstract piece in yellows and greens: It often did this when she was in here, especially if she was having some work-related stress, and she didn’t like it. There used to be a print exactly like that in her tutor’s office at LSTL, and Lydia always found it irritatingly distracting, and the canvas must have taken that image from her memory, picking up on how she associated it with feeling inadequate
I think you need a holiday, Fitz said.
But we just had a holiday. In May they’d spent three weeks in East Asia, first staying with the cultural attaché for that region, who was based in Shanghai, before moving on to Incheon, Seoul, Kyoto and Tokyo. It was an extraordinary trip but exhausting. At LSTL they had explained to Lydia she’d feel like this: having spent the first two decades of her life barely moving outside the town where she grew up, she’d find new places and experiences tiring. At the time Lydia felt this patronizing, but annoyingly it turned out to be accurate—during her first couple of months living in New York she spent a lot of her downtime just staring into space, too exhausted to process anything else.
Our trips aren’t holidays, Fitz replied.
This was true. All his holidays were working holidays, since he was always absorbing new aspects of human culture, and if she was with him she was working too.
You haven’t been home since you started working for me, he went on. Maybe that would do you good?
She told him her bag was already packed.
