Sophia left her mother and brother in County Clare when she was only six years old to live in Chicago with her father, a draftsman with an obsession for baking bread from the base of a starter that had been in Sophia's mother's family for generations. Thirty years later, she is a neuroscientist working on mapping the human brain while recovering from the loss of a pregnancy when the world is plunged into darkness by a blackout which coincides with the launch of an important AGI system, Ariel. Alone in the dark, Sophia considers what led her — and the world — to this point.
The novel moves through collective consciousness, mythology, and the quiet, pervasive logic of fermentation.
