Sourdough: A Novel

"Robin Sloan’s new novel, Sourdough, is like Fight Club meets The Great British Bake Off. It’s like Fight Club if no one got punched. It’s like Fight Club if Fight Club were written by someone concerned with a different, quieter kind of revolution, and if Fight Club were all about bread. Like his first book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, it is about geeks, nerds, coders, secret societies and bizarrely low-impact conspiracies that solely concern single-noun obsessives (food, in this case, rather than books). It concerns a young woman working as a robotics engineer who inherits a (semi)-magical sourdough starter that makes her friends, makes her famous and then almost eats San Francisco. And I’m only half-exaggerating that last part."