Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

That group has been working for centuries on a massive decoding project. Clay is hired to man the night shift solo.Įventually he uncovers the truth about Ajax Penumbra’s struggling San Francisco bookshop: that it’s a front for a secret society of scholars called the Unbroken Spine. Cash-strapped Clay wasn’t so lucky: he’s forced to take a clerk job at the titular bookstore-with its esoteric used inventory, inscrutable owner, and round-the-clock hours. After the economy collapsed, the ex-Googlers closed their business and hightailed it to Costa Rica. The narrator, Clay Jannon, is a victim of the “great food-chain contraction that swept through America in the early twenty-first century.” He’s been laid off from his web design job at a specialty bagel company run by a pair of ex-Google employees. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is a fast read and a clever book.

Penumbra himself… who has mysteriously disappeared.Robin Sloan’s debut novel Mr. What they discover is an ancient secret that can only be solved by modern means, and a global-conspiracy guarded by Mr. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he has plugged in his laptop, roped in his friends (and a cute girl who works for Google) and embarked on a high-tech analysis of the customers’ behaviour.

There are only a few fanatically committed customers, but they never seem to actually buy anything, instead they simply borrow impossibly obscure volumes perched on dangerously high shelves, all according to some elaborate arrangement with the eccentric proprietor. And it doesn’t take long for Clay to realize that the quiet, dusty book emporium is even more curious than the name suggests.

Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a Web-design drone and serendipity coupled with sheer curiosity has landed him a new job working the night shift at Mr. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2013 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARDSĪ New York Times bestseller, Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is an entirely charming and lovable first novel of mysterious books and dusty bookshops it is a witty and delightful love-letter to both the old book world and the new. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 DEBUT CATEGORY – KITCHIES PRIZE

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan