The wonderfully light and frothy fable Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Book Store (Text Publishing) celebrates, among other things, the enduring power of friendship and the joys of a good book.
When out-of-work art graduate Clay Jannon starts work on the graveyard shift at Mr Penumbra's store, he sees it as something to do until he finds a real job. Indeed it is a wonder that the business survives at all; the selection of popular fiction is both small and eclectic, with the vast bulk of the store dedicated to massive tomes written in incomprehensible language with titles like KRESIMIR and ERDOS.
Similarly, most customers come not to buy but to borrow, and are as curious a collection of individuals as the books themselves.
To while away the hours between 10pm and dawn, Clay starts to explore the contents of the shelves, creating a map of their contents and the borrowing habits of their readers on his computer.
This quickly reveals a pattern in their selection, a discovery that initiates him into a mysterious society called the Unbroken Spine, whose members have spent hundreds of years dedicated to deciphering the codex vitae of a 15th-century printer called Aldus Manutius in the belief that it contains the secret of immortality.
Intrigued, Clay enlists the help of a group of his friends and all the forces of modern data analysis (up to and including the entire computing power of Google) to solving the code, an approach that is anathema to the group's leader, who insists the solution must be pursued only by traditional means.
As with all good quests the hero eventually prevails, and although individual readers will differ in how satisfactory they find Manutius' secret when it is finally revealed, the journey to uncover it is great fun.
The author, Robin Sloan, obviously believes both in the enduring nature of story and the potential for new forms of presentation, from e-readers to print-on-demand publishing runs, to enhance rather than supplant the old-fashioned hard book. This is evident in the delight he takes in his own tale, and I for one hope he is right.
Dr McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
