“The Naming Song”: A Reading and Conversation with Jedediah Berry

Join the Worthington Library for a special author event with Jedediah Berry, whose novel The Naming Song won the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction. As part of the library’s monthly book club selection, attendees are invited to read The Naming Song in advance and then gather for a rich conversation with the author. Berry will share a reading from the novel, discuss its imaginative world and central themes, and take questions from the audience in a Q&A to follow.

The Naming Song is a wildly imaginative speculative novel that explores the power and politics of language through the story of an unnamed courier working for an authoritarian Naming Committee. New words become tools of control, and resistance brews among silent radicals and forgotten ghosts in a society where naming is both salvation and erasure. The Naming Song is a thrilling, thought-provoking adventure that fully embraces the beauty and power of what cannot be Named.

This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

JEDEDIAH BERRY is the author of The Naming Song, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.