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Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2012
On Sale: October 2, 2012
304 pages ISBN: 0374214913 EAN: 9780374214913 Kindle: B008FPOIT6 Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy,
complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young
love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal
life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco
bookstore
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay
Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design
drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to
climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig
working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize
that this store is even more curious than the name suggests.
There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly
and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking
out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the
store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing
arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be
a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s
embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior
and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s
going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr.
Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the
walls of the bookstore.
With irresistible brio and
dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary
adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both
the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic
novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young
Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s
rare to the world of literary fiction. Mr. Penumbra’s
24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an
establishment you have to enter and will never want to
leave, a modern-day cabinet of wonders ready to give a jolt
of energy to every curious reader, no matter the time of day.
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