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I CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO from Michigan, where I was raised and educated and where my body’s functioning was placid and predictable, mostly. Clement Street was a polyglot artery that pulsed with Cantonese, Burmese, Russian, Thai, and even scraps of Gaelic. I said yes, and music played-a song in some other language. Clement Street Soup and Sourdough! Okay to hold? It was a man’s voice, slightly breathless. I dialed the number and my call was answered immediately. The menu charmed me, and as a result, my night, and my life, bent off on a different track. Clement Street was just a few blocks away.

At the bottom, there was a phone number and the promise of quick delivery. In either case, the menu was compact: available was the Spicy Soup or a Spicy Sandwich or a Combo (double spicy), all of which, the menu explained, were vegetarian.Īt the top, the restaurant’s name was written in humongous, exuberant letters: CLEMENT STREET SOUP AND SOURDOUGH. The words were written in a dark, confident script-actually, two scripts: each dish was described once using the alphabet I recognized and again using one I didn’t, vaguely Cyrillic-seeming with a profusion of dots and curling connectors. My nightly ration of Slurry waited within.īut the menu intrigued me. I was just home from work and my face felt brittle from stress-this wasn’t unusual-and I would not normally have been interested in anything unfamiliar. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN nutritive gel for dinner, same as always, if I had not discovered stuck to my apartment’s front door a paper menu advertising the newly expanded delivery service of a neighborhood restaurant.

Then the company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market-and a whole new world opens up. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves to the General Dexterity cafeteria every day. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms.

She must keep it alive, they tell her-feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Southern Living Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, comes Sourdough, "a perfect parable for our times" ( San Francisco Magazine): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and under-socialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community as a baker.

From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr.