Named a best book of the year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Southern Living Includes the new short story "The Suitcase Clone" From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, comes Sourdough, "a perfect parable for our times" (San Francisco Magazine): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and undersocialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community as a baker. Lois Clary is a software engineer who 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. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers quickly close up shop, but they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. Lois must keep it alive, they tell her--feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she's providing loaves daily to her employer's cafeteria. When the company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer's market, a whole new world opens up.

Named a best book of the year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Southern Living Includes the new short story "The Suitcase Clone" From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, comes Sourdough, "a perfect parable for our times" (San Francisco Magazine): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and undersocialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community as a baker. Lois Clary is a software engineer who 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. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers quickly close up shop, but they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. Lois must keep it alive, they tell her--feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she's providing loaves daily to her employer's cafeteria. When the company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer's market, a whole new world opens up.