Reading the Bones

This skilful and entertaining exploration of language and cross-cultural communication presents a portrait of sentient beings in the midst of discovering written language. The Xenolinguists are a guild of alien-language translators who travel the galaxy. Translator Ries Danyo is a down-on-his-luck lingster, so far gone he's hooked on zyth. Once a promising talent, he's fallen to interpreting for the deputy commissioner's wife on her shopping sprees in the Freh bazaar. But when a Freh uprising leads to murder, Danyo must lead the commissioner's daughters to safety on a journey that irrevocably changes the Frehti language and the future of Krishna itself. Review "This short novel, expanded from one of her stories, a Nebula winning novella, . . . is her best novel to date." -- Don D'Ammassa, San Francisco Chronicle About the Author Sheila Finch was born in London, studied Medieval Literature and Linguistics at Indiana University, and currently teaches creative writing at El Camino College in California.