The Verifiers

True story: I bought The Verifiers by Jane Pek on a whim from an airport bookstore solely because of the front-cover blurb; any time Emily St. John Mandel tells me a book is “exhilaratingly well written”, well, I'm going to need it.

I knew from the singularly brilliant use of “potholed” as a verb on the very first page (“Their gazes skitter about, their sentences are potholed with ‘ums' and ‘wells'” -