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Reading lists

Uplifting climate books to inspire hope about the planet’s future

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9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Tiled jackets of fiction books that have changed the world, in Vintage Earth-themed colour scheme

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10 times fiction changed the world

Book, Entangled Life, surrounded by fungi and moss

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What to read if you loved Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

An assortment of Richard Powers' covers on a green background

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Where to start reading Richard Powers’ books

The Gold Bug Variations

A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth. The plot is as labyrinthine as any by Umberto Eco ... Extremely witty ... Dip into this book at random and the chances are it will sit up and bite you like a rattlesnake

The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow ... An outright marvel

The Gold Bug Variations has everything ... Stunning ... Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force ... The joy to be taken in reading the book is, like the pleasure of studying crystal multiplication, in seeing a pattern swarm mosaically over everything, watching a stencil laid over life

One of the best writers working now

Powers has triumphantly restored ... the philosophical novel

Richard Powers has published fourteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

'A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 
 
'Powers has triumphantly restored ... the philosophical novel' OBSERVER 
 
'A heroic tour de force' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
In 1957, brilliant biologist Stuart Ressler sets out to crack the genetic code. Yet his efforts are sidetracked by other, more complex codes - social, moral, musical, and spiritual - as he falls in love with a member of his research team. 
 
Years later, another young man and woman investigate a different mystery: why did the promising Ressler suddenly vanish from the world of science? 
 
Strand by strand, these two love stories intertwine in a double helix of desire in an enthralling tale about new love and the mysteries of science.

Orfeo

Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful

Powers is prodigiously talented. besides being fearfully erudite, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life

The best novel about classical music ... since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Orfeo has a galloping finale that is sweet, funny, sad and haunting all at once ... A formidably intelligent, ecstatically noisy novel

Extraordinary ... His evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page ... Once again, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our finest novelists

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 
 
'A virtuoso performance' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful' INDEPENDENT 
 
'A magnificent and moving novel' LOS ANGELES TIMES 
 
Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab - where he is conducting the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find musical patterns in surprising places - has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. 
 
Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive, earning him the moniker 'Bioterrorist Bach'. He hatches a daring 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. 
 
A gripping escape narrative filled with lyrical wonder, Orfeo is both a portrait of a creative, obsessive man, and a reflection on finding melodies in everyday life.

The Time of our Singing

An epic novel of modern America that weaves ideas of race, music and science into a mysterious but satisfying tapestry ... Endlessly fascinating

There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers ... It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this

A great hurtle of a book, telling several powerful stories at once ... Strangely subtle and moving ... an astonishing performance ... Prodigious, illuminating and exhilarating

'There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers ... It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this' GUARDIAN 
 
'Formidable ... rewarding' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'An astonishing performance' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
Jonah, Ruth, and Joseph are the children of mixed-race parents who aspire to raise them beyond the constraints of time and identity, immersing them in a world of song. However, they cannot shield them from the realities of the outside world forever. 
 
Jonah, a talented young tenor, finds that the opera world remains preoccupied with his race. Ruth, rejecting classical music, disappears instead into a life dedicated to activism and a new relationship. Over the years, Joseph - the middle child, a pianist, and our narrator - struggles not only to stay connected to his siblings but also to carve out a future on his own. 
 
A powerful story of a tragedy of race in America, The Time of Our Singing is an enthralling, harrowing novel about the lives of choices of one family at the crossroads of identity.

Operation Wandering Soul

'If you have children or will have children, if you know children or can remember being a child, dare to read Operation Wandering Soul ... Dense in knowledge, rich in imagination, powerful in expression, [it] is bedtime reading for the future. Like the stories read to children, this intensely caring novel can help prevent the nightmare it describes, children out too late at night, far from home, lost, the wandering souls of the future, our future

Powers' prose soars like the most magnificent of choirs, memorably capturing the moments of joy and anguish, barrenness and grace, that add up to life

Vast and daring ... A fully realised and major work of art

To read [Powers'] work is to be wowed by his verbal muscularity and by his ability to stitch seemingly disparate elements into a larger metaphorical fabric

Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today

In his ambition to define and dissect our culture, Powers is an agile younger brother to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon

'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 
 
'Powers' prose soars like the most magnificent of choirs' WASHINGTON POST 
 
'The most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
In the paediatrics ward of a public hospital, a group of sick children gather, their lives brightened only by the power of imagination. The surrogate parents of this group - Kraft, a tired, overworked surgical resident, and Espera, a dedicated therapist - are charged with prolonging their lives using storytelling and make-believe alone. 
 
Using the boundless reach of imagination, Operation Wandering Soul is a novel that celebrates the wonder of childhood. Both social indictment and emotional account of intimate needs, it asks how we might keep alive a little longer the enduring magic of childhood dreams.

The Echo Maker

Among his most stunning yet: profound and heartbreaking

A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology ... undoubtedly magnificent

An exhilarating narrative feat ... He is a formidable talent, and this is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel

Powers's most accessible novel ... a novel of richness and complexity, never dry or condescending, always weaving its way towards an unsettling emotional climax

An eloquent style, a strongly localised setting and a wealth of arcane and intricately researched detail ... the novel is full of character, in cast and locale, and it impressively manages to be both meditative and compelling

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory and his most recent novel, Bewilderment, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

‘A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology... undoubtedly magnificent’ The Times 
 
On a winter night, Mark Schluter’s truck turns over in a near-fatal accident. His sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to look after him. But when he finally awakes from his coma, Mark believes that Karin – who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister – is really an identical impostor. 
 
Shattered by her brother’s behaviour, Karin contacts neuroscientist Dr Gerald Weber. But what Weber discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what really happened. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.

Gain

Erudite, penetrating and splendidly written ... Dazzling

One can only admire Powers's breadth of vision, his erudition and powers of analysis

'Penetrating and splendidly written... Dazzling' New York Times 
 
In Lacewood, Illinois, Laura Bodey, a divorced mother of two and real estate agent, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has cancer. 
 
This same small town is home to Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston. Over the course of more than a century, it transforms into a powerful international corporation. 
 
Clare & Company's stunning growth reflects America's kaleidoscopic history, yet for Laura and her family, this wild success has profound and lasting consequences.

Richard Powers

Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times – from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI – and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and a deep awe for nature. This eloquent dance of the scientific and emotional makes him one of our finest story tellers. PLAYGROUND is brilliant, captivating and important

Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive

An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting

This ambitious, rapturous Booker-longlisted epic explores life underwater, generative AI, climate crisis and the power of play

Playground ... isn't merely a great American novel, but a magnificent one

Along with its environmental warnings, the book carries an intriguing look at the ways people and animals play, as in the boys’ competitive chess, the antics of manta rays, the allure of computer games, and what a meta-minded author might do with his readers. An engaging, eloquent message for this fragile planet.

Magisterial, moving and thought-provoking ... a beautiful love letter to our oceans

A work of imaginative skill that opens doors into an undersea future where human exceptionalism isn't taken for granted, and finds hope where other writers, and thinkers, would dwell in despair

A compelling, eloquent love letter to what [Powers] calls this "fading" planet ... There is a lot going on in Playground, with reflections on power, nature and friendship in a book with well-drawn protagonists and graceful prose. It is a story that rewards a slow read for full immersement

That Powers is an outstanding writer is hardly news. But with Playground, he proves himself a wizard. This novel is one long, clever magic trick'

It captures the majesty of the deep…The novel transports readers to a world as fascinating as it is forbidding

Hugely ambitious ... Paint[s] the page with colour and refracted light.

With the slowly intertwining stories of four characters who are each pulled into the island's orbit, Powers has spun gold with this novel. The skill with which he conjures the ocean is as though he has spent his entire life under sea, and the way it interrogates technology, ecology and community is erudite yet thoroughly engaging. Its ending, meanwhile, floored me.

An epic celebration of marine life and a meditation on progress and AI

[Richard Powers] is one of our finest storytellers, taking important present-day subjects from environmental issues to AI, and turning them into riveting novels ... a mesmerizing, hugely important tale

I loved Richard Powers's newest novel, Playground, which feels extremely relevant and urgent. Set in the US and Makatea, a tiny island in the Pacific, it weaves together the catastrophic warming of the oceans with advances in AI, helping us understand what is rapidly being lost as the climate-compromised future hurtles towards us

A characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display.

[Powers is] a grand old oak of American letters ... Playground is an enchanting entry point to his work that swings open easily ... Reminds, with a spirit of fun and wonder, why the sea ? an alien planet within a planet ? is so very worth sustained attention ... This is a novel that pries us from our daily hourglass, forcing a hard focus on the sand.

Prepare to be awed … A mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet … I can’t think of another novel that treats the Earth’s plight with such an expansive and disorienting vision … Powers manages to entwine our longing for friendship, paradise and immortality with the algorithms of artificial intelligence that surpass all understanding.

Ravishing ... Implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human life-forms surrounding us on Earth.

Exhilarating ... intoxicating ... [a] sprawling parable of a book.

Unexpected and genuinely fascinating

Gorgeous ... No author has done more to turn our gaze outward to the mysteries of the universe, above our heads and below our feet.

History unspools in this luminous journey that interweaves a 3,000-year-old board game, AI and floating cities ... all-around delightful.

Vivid and ambitious … a love letter to the natural world … Playground is ravishing in its descriptions of an underwater universe as fragile as it is ancient and unyielding

Magnificent … A provocative exploration of our depths both interior and oceanic.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 
 
THE POWERFUL NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AND BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY AND BEWILDERMENT 
 
‘Ascends to the plane of true, indisputable greatness' OBSERVER 
'An ambitious, rapturous epic' GUARDIAN 
‘Magisterial, moving and thought-provoking … a beautiful love letter to our oceans’ NEW SCIENTIST 
 
Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school. As adults, Rafi gets lost in literature, while Todd’s enters the world of AI. Elsewhere, Evie sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. 
 
All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure. 
 
Set in the world’s largest ocean, Playground interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity. 
 
'Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and live' PERCIVAL EVERETT 
 
'Brilliant, captivating and important' ANDREA WULF 
 
'An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting' EMMA DONOGHUE 
 
Praise for Richard Powers: 
 
'Powers has extraordinary gifts as a writer' GUARDIAN 
'Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality' OBSERVER 
'He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent' OPRAH WINFREY 
'It is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message' SUNDAY TIMES 
'Refreshing, original and moving' EVENING STANDARD

Richard Powers

Praise for Playground

Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times – from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI – and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and ...

Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive

An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting

Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times – from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI – and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and ...

Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive

An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting

Powers is a master of taking important topics of our times – from threats to our oceans and climate change to AI – and turning them into riveting and fiercely relevant books imbued with psychological insight and ...

Is there anything Richard Powers cannot write? The world here is complete, seductive, and promising. The writing feels like the ocean. Vast, mysterious, deep and alive

An extraordinarily immersive journey through lives linked in mysterious ways - gripping, alarming and uplifting

Books by Richard Powers

Articles featuring Richard Powers

Uplifting climate books to inspire hope about the planet’s future

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

10 times fiction changed the world

What to read if you loved Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Where to start reading Richard Powers’ books

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