In Speechless (Lasavia Publishing, October 2025), New Zealand novelist and poet Mike Johnson delivers a book that deserves to be read. It is a coming-of-age narrative infused with magical realism and prose so rich and emotive that it clings to the reader’s imagination. What binds the story together is love, not only between two people, but between a man and the power of language itself. As a child, Michael Paewai Meer encounters the enigmatic and otherworldly ‘Word Bringer’. This visionary experience awakens in him a lifelong obsession with the symbolic power of words. From that moment, language shapes and shadows his journey to adulthood. Words become the life-force of his emotions, the key to his connection with both fantasy and reality, until he reaches a final, transcendent silence that is both inevitable and liberating. Johnson writes with a lyricism that unsettles and consoles in equal measure. His prose shifts effortlessly fr...