No one can find it. That’s the first thing. The Recording Room is on the eleventh floor, at the end of a rat-hued hallway that some workers at the newspaper have never seen; they give up on the ancient elevator, which makes only local stops with loud creaks of protest. Like New Yorkers who refuse to venture above 14th Street, there are newspaper workers who refuse to go above the fourth floor for fear of being lost forever if they leave the well-lit newsroom for dark floors unknown.

In this room you’ll find Lena. She works as a transcriptionist for the Record, a behemoth New York City newspaper. For years, she has been the ever-present link for reporters calling in stories from around the world. Turning spoken words to print, Lena is the vein that connects the organs of the paper. There once were many transcriptionists at the Record, but new technology and the ease of communication has put most of them out of work, so now Lena sits alone in a room on the building’s 11th floor, far away from the hum of the newsroom that is the heart of the paper. Still, it is an important job --- vital, really --- a vein that connects the organs of the paper, and Lena takes it very seriously.

And then one day she encounters something that shatters the reverie that has become her life --- an article in the paper about a woman mauled to death by lions in the city zoo. The woman was blind and remains unidentified, but there is a picture, and Lena recognizes her as someone whom a few days before she had met and talked to briefly while riding home on a midtown bus.

Obsessed with understanding what caused the woman to climb into the lion’s den, Lena begins a campaign for truth that will ultimately destroy the Record’s complacency and shake the venerable institution to its very foundation. In the process she finds a new set of truths that gives her the strength to shed what she describes as her “secondhand life” and to embrace a future filled with promise, maybe even adventure.

An exquisite novel that asks probing questions about journalism and ethics, about the decline of the newspaper and the failure of language, THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST is also the story of a woman’s effort to establish a place for herself in an increasingly alien and alienating world.