Every so often a book creeps up on you and catches you by surprise. Over the last several nights, staying up way too late, I have been in a state of surprise, delight. excitement and wonder. I finished the book last night, or should I say earlier this morning. I came across it through social media. I have a fairly unusual name, Lois, and there is a Lois group I’m a part of, a fairly inactive part to be honest. It was probably the beginning of last week, or maybe that weekend, when one of the other Loises mentioned how unusual it is to find a novel with a Lois in it. Somebody mentioned a book which I took to be a cookery book, but no, it was a novel by an author I had never heard of before. The main character of his book, in fact the narrator, is Lois.
I immediately bought it – ‘Sourdough‘ by Robin Sloan. Almost as soon as I started reading it, certainly within the first few pages I was gripped. I just could not put it down, one chapter after another, until I began to think it was too good to be true and before long it would lose it’s momentum, or I would lose my interest. In fact I realised I needed to sleep so reluctantly put it down, but fell upon it again when I got into bed the next night. I slowed my reading, because there are parts of it which need thinking about, and there were some bits I had to reread because I’d rushed over them and the plot began to get more and more complex.
This is part of the blurb:
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighbourhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! There are visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her – feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.
… and here is a quote from a Guardian review:
Sourdough is a soup of skilfully balanced ingredients: there’s satire, a touch of fantasy, a pinch of SF, all bound up with a likeable narrator whose zest for life is infectious. The novel opens a door on a world that’s both comforting and thrillingly odd.
It is indeed odd, but odd in a brilliant and exciting way! Some of the time I couldn’t grasp all that was happening, but I didn’t worry, I just allowed myself to be carried along by the amazing, vivid, and extraordinary story of Lois Clary and her baking. The writing is wonderful, so evocative, so effortless, the characters jump off the page, the scene-setting is incredible, and some of the fantastical things which happen are mind-boggling – in a good way!
It is not in the least like ‘Piranesi’ by Susanna Clarke, but I was reminded of it, being transported to another world, although the world in ‘Sourdough’ is set in the reality of San Francisco and a robotics company. ‘Comforting and thrillingly odd,’ as the Guardian review says.
Lois Elsden 