Arriving at Orbit this summer from Waterstones Book Club author Louisa Hall comes SPEAK, a novel which will make readers everywhere question what it really means to be human.

Emily St. John Mandel, Arthur C. Clarke winner and author of STATION ELEVEN, calls SPEAK the ‘rarest of finds’, and it is already one of Huffington Post‘s Brilliant Books You Won’t Want to Miss this Summer.

She cannot run. She cannot walk. She cannot even blink. As her batteries run down for the final time, all she can do is speak. Will you listen?

From Alan Turing’s conviction in the 1950s to a Silicon Valley Wunderkind imprisoned in 2040 for creating illegally lifelike dolls. From a pilgrim girl writing her diary to a traumatised young girl exchanging messages with a software program, all these lives have shaped and changed a single artificial intelligence – MARY3. In Speak, she tells you their story, and her own. It the last story she will ever tell, spoken both in celebration and in warning.

When machines learn to speak, who decides what it means to be human?

[Cover design by Jack Smyth from the Little, Brown Book Group Design team.]