The Libri GmbH The Broken Abacus Paperback

The Broken Abacus

In 2050, Budi has everything that's supposed to make him happy: a product manager job at a sleek tech company, a smart apartment, and an AI assistant named Inez who knows his heart rate better than anyone. But everything is merely enough - never more. He wakes up every morning chasing targets that never feel satisfied, his only ritual five minutes of silence with a scratched spoon and a glass of coffee before the screens take over.

When a lucid dream transports him to a wooden house in the rice fields of Bali, an old woman asks him a simple question: "What are you looking for?" The answer - "peace" - sets in motion a journey that will pull him from the fluorescent haze of the office into the slow rhythms of the island, where he meets Gek Ari, a woman who seems to have been waiting for him before he even knew he was coming.

Part tech-noir, part spiritual memoir, THE BROKEN ABACUS is a meditation on what it means to be human in a world that has forgotten how to be still. Written in short, punchy prose that moves like a dream, Mandala Putra's debut novel asks: when algorithms care more than the people around you, is that enough? Or does connection require something only another human can give?

For readers of Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, and anyone who has ever sat at the edge of their bed at midnight, wondering: Is this life?

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- Literary science fiction / contemporary fiction
- 17 chapters, 14,500 words
- Originally written in Indonesian as KemBALI
- First English edition