ARLIT

THE YELLOW LANGUAGEA linguist. A dying script. A company that would rather bury the truth than translate it.When Orano — the French state uranium giant — offers Mara Szabo a fee too large to ask questions about, she tells herself it's just consulting work: identify an “informal” script phenomenon appearing on mining equipment in Arlit, Niger, and go home. But the marks aren't graffiti.The people who built it will not let it be erased. Neither, once she understands what she's looking at, will Mara.What follows is a run across two borders, a paper that goes public faster than anyone can contain it, and a reckoning with a company whose reach extends further than a checkpoint, a contract, or a closed file.Arlit is a novel about the languages built to survive what official records are built to forget — about a woman who spent her life studying how knowledge survives, and finally has to decide what she's willing to risk to keep it surviving.