Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

This is my first novel, and it grew from a story posted on this very web­site into a New York Times Best Seller pub­lished in more than twenty countries.

It’s a tale of books and technology, cryp­tog­raphy and conspiracy, friend­ship and love. It begins in a mys­te­rious San Fran­cisco bookstore, but quickly reaches out into the wider world and the shad­owed past. I talked about the ideas behind the book on NPR’s Morning Edition and had a real-life bib­lio­phile adven­ture with the New York Times.

In Blip Magazine, George Saun­ders called Penumbra

a real tour-de-force, a beau­tiful fable that is given legs by the author’s bravado use of the real (Google is in there, for instance, the actual campus) to sell us on a shadow world of the unreal and the speculative. Robin Sloan comes across as so bighearted, so in love with the world — the ancient world, the con­tem­po­rary world — so in love with love, in love with friend­ship, in love with the idea that our tech­nical abil­i­ties can serve as con­duits for beauty, that the reader is swept along by his enthusiasm. It’s a lot of fun — but it’s also a pow­erful reading expe­ri­ence with a won­derful undeniability.

Ajax Penumbra 1969

Bun­dled with the latest MCD edi­tion of Penumbra, you’ll find a short prequel. The story is set in San Fran­cisco, August 1969. A young man named Ajax Penumbra arrives on the scene, looking not for free love but rather for a book: a very old volume that might pos­sess strange powers. His search leads him to a tiny bookstore, taller than it is wide … 

November 2022, Berkeley