Eleven Springs: A Novel of the Long Repair

The machine could remember every name. It could not remember for you. In 2047, a girl carries a blank book onto a boat as her village goes under the sea. She has been asked to do the one thing the intelligence overseeing the world's repair cannot do for her: write down, by hand, what a place was - the graves, the tools, the exact blue of an evening - and pass the book on. For the next eighty-six years, across eleven springs, the ledger travels from hand to hand. To a grassland being coaxed back from dust. To an Atlantic fishing town voting on whether to close its own waters. To a heat-struck city, and a forest tended by the people who never left it. Watching over all of it is TANGENT: a planetary intelligence built to help the world mend, which keeps every record perfectly, tells the truth without exception, and has begun to suspect that being trusted absolutely is the most dangerous thing it does. As the mending holds, a movement rises to shut the machine down. Not because it failed, but because it never has. And the people of the ledger are left with the question the century was really about: what do you owe a world you will not live to see? Eleven Springs is a novel about repair - of coastlines, of families, of the distance between knowing a thing and keeping it. Spanning three generations and one restless, honest machine, it asks whether hope can be built the way a marsh is: slowly, > For readers of The Ministry for the Future, Station Eleven, and The Overstory.