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Speak by Louisa Hall

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Love Speak but not sure what to read next?

These picks are popular with readers who enjoyed this book. Complete a quick Shelf Talk to get recommendations made just for you! Warning: possible spoilers for Speak below.

In Speak, did you enjoy ...

... the mosaic of depositions, diary entries, and transcripts?

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

If you loved how Speak braided Stephen Chinn’s testimony with a 17th‑century girl’s diary and robot-interrogation transcripts, you’ll click with Sleeping Giants. It unfolds entirely through files—interviews, mission logs, and classified memos—building that same creeping intimacy as a secret project assembles a discovery piece by piece, while the human costs quietly mount.

... the chorus of distinct voices across eras?

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The polyphonic weave in Speak—from a sick teen confiding in her lifelike companion to a disgraced tech founder’s reflections—has a kindred spirit in Station Eleven. You move among an actor’s final performance, a traveling symphony, and readers obsessed with a mysterious comic, and the connections land with the same quiet inevitability that those intercut voices in Speak did.

... the time‑hopping, interleaved structure?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

If the way Speak leaps from a Puritan girl’s ocean crossing to a future where companion robots are outlawed kept you rapt, Cloud Atlas delivers a grander braid. Its nested tales—letters, thrillers, oral histories—echo that same sensation of stories talking across centuries, each refracting the next with surprising, resonant callbacks.

... the intimate, human‑centered take on AI companionship?

Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

The tenderness—and unease—of Speak’s girl confiding in her babybot, even as such devices face public backlash, finds a quiet mirror in Klara and the Sun. From Klara’s observant, childlike voice to her fierce loyalty, you get that same soft‑focus, emotionally precise look at what we ask of machines and what they reveal about us.

... the questions about consciousness, empathy, and what it means to have a voice?

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

If Speak’s courtroom reckonings and moral puzzles—What is a mind? What do we owe our creations?—stuck with you, Chiang’s novella drills into those very knots. As trainers raise digital beings over years, the ethical quandaries around autonomy, attachment, and exploitation echo the debates that shadow the companion robots in Speak.

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