Applying herself earnestly and enthusiastically to the task, Lois finds that she excels at it, and soon she is foisting the fruits of her labor onto eager, gluten-tolerant co-workers, one of whom encourages her to hawk her wares at a local farmer’s market. Armed with this magical mixture of flour and water (it really is magic-it even sings!), Lois-whose fridge and gastronomic knowledge has heretofore been utterly barren-begins to bake. When they are forced to flee the country due to visa issues, Lois is entrusted with something that jogs her from her dispassionate existence: a sourdough starter.

Her only respite is a neighborhood takeout place she orders from each evening, run by two infinitely amiable brothers. The money is good, but the longer Lois stays in the role, the more she feels like the product she’s working on. As Robin Sloan’s latest novel opens, Lois gets a plum gig working at a tech company that specializes in robotics. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore such a sensation, while taking on even more satisfying challenges, Sourdough marks the triumphant return of a unique and beloved young writer.Īn Amazon Best Book of September 2017: Bread is life as the saying goes, and it certainly is life-changing for software engineer-turned-baker, Lois Clary. Leavened by the same infectious intelligence that made Robin Sloan’s Mr. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. She must keep it alive, they tell her―feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening.

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. In his much-anticipated new novel, Robin Sloan does for the world of food what he did for the world of books in Mr. Named one of the best books of 2017 by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Barnes & Noble, and Southern Living

Sourdough the novel