The Margin - Hardcover

by Kathy Keating (Author)

Everything is shaping the way we think. The only question left is whether that's the problem or the cure.

It's 2036 and everyone has a version of the truth that feels complete. Nobody is lying. Everybody is trapped. The world isn't divided by facts anymore. It's divided by which story we were handed about what the facts mean.

In a small independent bookshop called The Margin, six people find each other the way people do in places that still feel real. By accident. Or was it? Among them: a woman who can read anyone in sixty seconds but can't reach the parents she's losing to the noise. An artist whose fame was built on radical honesty, and who is hiding from himself. And someone who has been quietly, invisibly reshaping the way people encounter each other and what they believe. Not to deceive, but to protect the space where real thinking can still happen. And it's working. Which is exactly what makes the question so hard.

The Margin is set in a near future where technology has become so woven into daily life that most people have stopped noticing where it ends and they begin. Where algorithms know what we want before we do, but knowing someone and being known by them has never felt harder.

It's a novel about the difference between being seen and being truly known. About why we cannot fight belonging with facts. We have to offer something deeper. About what happens when people who've each been damaged by the noise discover that someone is trying to fix it without asking permission. And that no one is really clean. Including us.

Some questions don't have clean answers. This book is about learning to live inside that dilemma.