Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012). Contemporary fiction. Hardcover. 288 pages. ISBN: 978-0-374-21491-3.

A fun, amusing, smart page-turner that’s perfect for long winter nights. I picked it up and immediately became attached to the San Francisco setting, the Google culture and geeky characters wrapped up in the story of old vs. new technology. Clay Jannon loses his fantastic web-design gig, stumbles upon a graveyard shift in an obscure indie bookstore. The clientele and books seem strange. Clay, a fantasy fan, begins to investigate and becomes entangled in a super-secret society searching for immortality. Reminded me a bit of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X. As Coupland covered Microsoft and my generation, Robin Sloan tackles Google and today’s e-reading 20-somethings. In this novel there’s much discussion about bookstores, book-selling, e-readers, book-scanning and the future of books and book publishing with cloak and dagger sleuthing mixed in.

–Amy Steele

FTC Disclosure: I did not receive this book for review from the publisher.