The Word Trove is a beautifully designed little book. That’s not meant to be patronising, it is a small hardback with a lovely dustcover and boards, it even has its own bookmark. It’s an allegorical hymn of praise to language but also a warning as to what happens when words are misused. Entirely topical in these days of fake news and doublespeak. It tells the story of a word that loses its meaning when spoken by a human and travels to the city of Langwich to find it. A slightly irritating whimsicality is outweighed by the inventiveness of the language and the torrent of wordplay, puns, personification and laugh aloud moments. I loved the blank canvas handed by the artist to the Idiom as ‘he was no oil painting’ and the ‘reclining figure of speech’ What is truly amazing is that this book is a translation from the German. The translator, Romy Fursland, is quite properly fully acknowledged and gets an afterword in which she explains how a translator uses ‘dynamic equivalence’ to give her audience the same ‘experience’ as the reader of the original language. This means finding a phrase or a word which works in the same way even if it doesn’t have the same meaning. Fascinating. This is a difficult book to categorise but a must read if you are someone who is fascinated by the flexibility of the English language. I’m still not sure that I guessed the Word’s meaning though. Buy it for yourself or the wordsmith in your life.