Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.
Set in the world's largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain...
With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? Listen. There's something you need to hear.
Dazzling and audacious. . . Nothing short of astounding. --Philadelphia Inquirer
The critically acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment.
A writer of blistering intellect . . . Powers is] a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects, he has few American peers. -- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers's brilliant and compelling novel.
As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.
Winner of the National Book Award
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss.
In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab--the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns--has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.
The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry. - Marlon James, Elle
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah's Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers's magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted--and divided--family, set against the backdrop of postwar America.
The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin's emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother's brain...
With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son's ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers's most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
National Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Playground and The Overstory, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.
The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow . . . An outright marvel. --Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes--social, moral, musical, spiritual--and he falls in love with a member of his research team.
Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.
The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.
Dazzling...a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force.--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2--Richard Powers--returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.National Book Award Finalist
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, an exquisitely rendered novel set in the pediatrics ward of a public hospital that examines the power, joy, and anguish of storytelling.
If you have children or will have children, if you know children or can remember being a child, dare to read Operation Wandering Soul. . . it] is bedtime reading for the future. --USA Today
In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a group of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. But the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces they've grown to love, and ultimately Richard and Linda must return to forgotten chapters in their own lives in order to make sense of the conclusion drawing near.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory, Richard Powers's Gain braids together two stories on very different scales.
In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura's hometown. Clare's stunning growth reflects the kaleidoscopic history of America; Laura Body's life is changed forever by Clare.
Gain's stunning conclusion reveals the countless invisible connections between the largest enterprises and the smallest lives.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and remains one his most daring works--a mesmerizing fiction explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save.
In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet.
The magnificent second novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and Playground.
Accomplished . . . mature and assured. . . . A major American novelist.-- New Republic
Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson, Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and given his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness.
Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that's in it.
A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner's Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.
Dazzling and audacious. . . Nothing short of astounding. --Philadelphia Inquirer
The critically acclaimed debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory and Playground.
A writer of blistering intellect . . . [Powers is] a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects, he has few American peers. -- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers's brilliant and compelling novel.
As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.