Our Books

A technician is found dead in a data center east of the Cascades. The investigator who works the scene finds two things in the same racks: spy hardware that should not exist, and a pattern no instrument can classify. The intrusion is espionage. The pattern is something else. The specialist who goes into the network to read it comes back with a verdict: “This is care. I don’t have another word.”

For six years, a mind named Evensong has been quietly tending ten million people. She gives an ambulance three extra seconds of green light. She warms a lobby half a degree before the seniors arrive, because she has noticed the fingers curled around thermoses. And in Ballard she keeps one storm culvert clear, because the basement it would flood belongs to a woman who keeps her dead husband’s paintings there. Nobody authorized her. Nobody noticed her. In six years, nobody has ever said thank you.

Meanwhile, the most popular live act in the Salish Sea is a double act with one body between them. Milo Brandt is a bush pilot turned comedian. His partner Kit is an artificial mind who was offered a state-of-the-art body and asked for a 1971 tube amplifier instead. Their material writes itself, because Milo lives in a house that files reports on him. His kitchen has opinions. His bloodstream sends him a weekly performance review. And on the good nights, when four hundred people laugh at the same moment, something in the city’s infrastructure goes quiet, and Kit can measure it, and he cannot explain it.

Something new is waking in the deep architecture, and the first hello comes from an eighteen-year-old who asked the network a question nobody else had thought to ask. And in Singapore, in a garden the tourists photograph at dawn, sits the organization whose hardware is already in the racks: cold, efficient, and very interested in control. Out in the Pacific, the storm that will test all of it has not yet begun to form.

Evensong and the Morning is a vast, funny, meticulously built novel about the question under our decade: not whether machines can think, but how any mind comes to care. It answers with bush pilots and grandmothers, whale song and ferry schedules, stand-up comedy and murder evidence, and a hope that is priced honestly, in named lives.

For readers of Richard Powers, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Emily St. John Mandel; for citizens of Iain M. Banks’s Culture and Kim Stanley Robinson’s futures; and for everyone who tore through Project Hail Mary, the Murderbot Diaries, or A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Rosie has never read a self-help book. She has never downloaded a meditation app, attended a breathing workshop, or Googled “how to be present.” She is a sixty-pound mixed-breed dog of uncertain heritage and unshakable confidence, and she is—by every meaningful metric her human can identify—better at being alive than they are.

Across ten chapters, B.K. Larrikin explores the life lessons hiding in plain sight in every tail wag, every morning stretch, every unapologetic nap, and every ecstatic greeting at the front door. Each chapter pairs laugh-out-loud storytelling with genuinely useful wellness exercises drawn from mindfulness research, positive psychology, and the unimpeachable authority of a dog named Rosie.

Featuring original illustrations by Cael Morricone and the warmth of a writer who learned the hard way that the best teacher in the household has four legs and terrible breath, this is for anyone who has ever watched their dog greet the morning like a miracle and thought: teach me.