Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore - Couverture souple

Fun and funny and just plain enjoyable. It has mysterious books and thievery and Google (the place!)... It celebrates both the old and the new in delightful ways... And it has the honour of being the first novel of 2013 to make me cry, completely unexpectedly. Happy tears of that good-book-sucker-punch-to-the-place-in-the-heart-where-the-booklove-lives sort. --Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

It's a proper novel. By which I mean, not that it has pages you actually turn that is optional with novels nowadays but pages that you actually want to turn, which is getting rarer and rarer.... Charming, gently comedic, sweetly nerdy and enthusiastic about media both old and new. --Irish Times

Think of this novel as part Haruki Murakami, part Dan Brown and part Joseph Cornell: a surreal adventure, an existential detective story and a cabinet of wonders at which to marvel. --Newsday
A clever and whimsical tale with a big heart. --The Economist

Delightful --Washington Post

Rollicking --New York Times

Irresistible, page-turning --Newsweek

A real tour de force, a beautiful fable... It's a lot of fun but it's also a powerful reading experience. --George Saunders

Cryptographic cults, vertical bookshops, hot geeks, theft, and the pursuit of immortality. I loved it. --Nick Harkaway

An utterly charming modern love-letter to reading, and Robin Sloan has affectionately mashed up tradition and technology in this delightful novel that reads like The Social Network meets The Da Vinci Code. --Stylist

Delightful... The protagonist is a tech nerd, but he's also a book nerd, so both those who crave shiny new technologies and those who relish the scent of paper will find room in these pages... Smart, hip and witty --Washington Post

Irresistible --Newsweek --Newsweek

Delightful... The protagonist is a tech nerd, but he's also a book nerd, so both those who crave shiny new technologies and those who relish the scent of paper will find room in these pages... Smart, hip and witty --Washington Post

Irresistible --Newsweek

A literary adventure story for the 21st century

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a web-design drone, and serendipity, sheer curiosity and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey have landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than its name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything. Instead they “check 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 has embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behaviour and roped his friends into helping him figure out just what’s going on. But once they take their findings to Mr. Penumbra, they discover the secrets extend far beyond the walls of the bookstore.

Evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or Umberto Eco, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave.