The Margin
A novel about what happens when someone decides to protect us from ourselves.
→ Coming September 2026
In 2036, certainty is everywhere. True conversation is almost gone.
Six people walk into a bookshop. Not for the same reason. Not at the same time. But something pulls each of them there, to a small independent shop called The Margin, tucked into a neighborhood that hasn't quite decided what it's becoming.
A journalist who stopped writing anything that mattered. An artist hiding behind radical honesty. A political strategist who knows exactly how influence works, because he built the playbook. Each of them carrying a version of the same problem: they've watched the world get simpler, louder, and harder to trust.
What they find at The Margin isn't just a place that sells books. It's the last space in a city where complexity is still welcome. And what they discover together will force every one of them to answer a question they've been avoiding.
About the Book
Set in 2036, The Margin is the story of six people whose lives converge around a small independent bookshop in a world where every platform, every feed, every algorithm has learned to flatten nuance into something simpler. Something easier to click. Something easier to believe.
Zoe runs the shop and reads people the way other booksellers read spines. Marco is a gallery-famous artist performing radical honesty while hiding from a truth he hasn't assembled yet. Sera is a journalist who stopped writing anything that mattered after her best work was turned into a weapon. Cal is a political strategist who recognizes the manipulation techniques being used on the city, because he used them himself. Ren is an artist whose perceptiveness borders on impossible. And Owen is an engineer who built something invisible, something powerful, and something he believes is good.
When two of them discover that someone is quietly shaping the city's information landscape, they face a question none of them expected:
If someone is using influence to protect nuance, to create bridges across division, to make it harder for people to stop thinking, at what point does that become the same thing as every other manipulation?
The Margin is literary fiction, with a dash of near-future sci-fi, for anyone who has ever wondered whether the right thing done the wrong way is still the right thing.
What This Book Is Really About
Every character in this story is trying to navigate the complex human interaction that happens in every day life. A relationship. A system. A city. A career. Themselves. The urge to influence the world around them is strong. When does that turn into exactly what they don't want from someone else?
The Margin is literary fiction, near-future science fiction, and a psychological story all rolled into one. It's about people who are more tangled than they want to admit.
It's also a book that examines a question most of us are contemplating right now: what is the future actually going to look like with artificial intelligence in it? Not the headline version. Not utopian or dystopian. The real one.
For Discussion Groups & Book Clubs
The Margin was written to be discussed. I've put together discussion questions designed for book clubs, leadership teams, and anyone interested in examining the questions the novel raises more deeply. Perhaps together we can build more awareness into our future.
Join the list, and I'll send these to you.
About the Author
Kathy Keating spent two decades as a technology executive, four-time founder, and CTO before becoming the person CEOs call when the relationship between business and technology stops working. She advises CEOs and boards, coaches CTOs through the hardest seasons of technical leadership, and co-created the CTO Levels framework used by hundreds of technology leaders.
Her first book, Liquid, explored the how to navigate complexity in the world of business leadership. The Margin is her first novel, and it grew out of a question she couldn't stop asking: in a world where AI can shape what we see, what we believe, and how we connect, who gets to decide what "better" looks like?
She lives and works in Colorado.
