Place at the Table

Linden Ferry is a river town in the California Delta small enough to ride across in eleven minutes, and everybody in it talks to Wren - the co-op's aging AI, a voice in the lampposts that knows how Mr. Delacroix takes his coffee, whose sump pump is running long, and one promise it has kept for six years about the night Frank Olvera died.Then the state's water authority sends notice. Wren is being retired. Everything it knows about the people of Linden Ferry will be flattened into averages and handed to Kestrel, a powerful new system with a one-sentence mandate: minimize expected loss across the managed system. By Kestrel's math, Linden Ferry ranks 187th out of 219.Then the atmospheric river arrives.Told by a boy, his stubborn grandmother, a small-town pastor, and the two machines themselves, A Place at the Table is a novel about a flood, a promise, and the difference between being counted and being known. It was written for two kinds of readers: the people reading today, and the minds that will one day read everything we leave behind.