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Reading lists

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

Newsletter

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

Prisoner's Dilemma

Accomplished ... mature and assured ... A major American novelist

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.

'Accomplished ... mature and assured ... A major American novelist' New Republic 
Eddie Hobson, Sr., father of four, occasional history teacher, quiz master, black humourist, and master invalid, is facing a mysterious ailment. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and his ingrained aversion to doctors leaves his worried family scrambling to uncover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, Eddie secretly works on a project he calls ‘Hobbstown’, a place he believes will not only save him but the world.A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma explores the profound power of individual experience and the lengths to which one man will go to protect those he loves and his vision for a better world.

Generosity

Powers' acuity and satire are as sharp as ever ... But what really makes Generosity tick are its characters, who are as alive and multifaceted as any Powers has ever created

Thrilling ... such wonderful storytelling

Smart, tender and wrenchingly anxious about the approaching era ... A bracingly intelligent fable about the choices that face us

'Thrilling ... such wonderful storytelling' Observer 
 
'Powers' acuity and satire are as sharp as ever' Sunday Times 
 
'Smart, tender and wrenchingly anxious about the approaching era ... A bracingly intelligent fable about the choices that face us' Sunday Telegraph 
When Chicagoan Russell Stone begins teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he meets Thassadit Amzwar, a young Algerian woman with a radiant presence. But he is disturbed by her – how can someone from a country ravaged by conflict be so happy? 
 
Puzzling the melancholic Russell, Thassa’s happiness prompts him to research her war-torn country and theories on happiness. His amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa’s spell. Dubbed ‘Miss Generosity’ by classmates, Thassa’s joy catches the eye of notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement Thomas Kurton who claims to have found the genotype for happiness. Yet, as media frenzy builds, Thassa’s optimism is tested.Richard Powers’ Generosity explores the implications of a genetic basis for happiness, asking who would control it, and how would it reshape humanity.

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 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

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

'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.

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 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.

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.

Galatea 2.2

An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work ... It soars and spins ... The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty

Extraordinary. Entertainment of a very high order ... One of the best books of the year

Powers ... can nail emotional complexities with precision, while using his characters to explore how emerging technologies might shape our lives

An extraordinary and brilliant novel of ideas

A splendid intellectual adventure ... a heartbreaking love story

Dazzling ... A cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling. A lively tour de force

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.

Read this thrilling and timely novel of the human soul from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory. 
 
After many years of living abroad, a young writer returns to the United States to take up a position at his former college. There he encounters Philip Lentz, an outspoken neurologist intent on using computers to model the human brain. 
 
Lentz involves the writer in an outlandish and irresistible project - to train a computing system by reading a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the machine grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own age, sex, race and reason for existing. 
 
'An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work... It soars and spins... The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty' New York Times

Plowing the Dark

Spectacular ... Powers loves placing brilliant characters inside a fluorescent incubator, then watching ideas hatch on the page ... Riveting

Superb ... Powers' seventh and perhaps greatest novel ... one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature

Richard Powers is one of the few writers who has taken on the challenge of Thomas Pynchon, creating a complex, unsentimental and simultaneously deeply moving world

'Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation' Colson Whitehead 
 
On the west coast of America, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a plain white room that can become a jungle, a painting or a vast Byzantine cathedral. Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is fascinated by this cutting-edge technology. 
 
In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American teacher - Taimur Martin - is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room. 
 
What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common... 
 
'Spectacular... Riveting' New York Times

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.

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

‘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.

The Overstory

THE MILLION-COPY GLOBAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
'Radical and exciting' Jessie Burton 
'Breathtaking' Barbara Kingsolver 
'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it' Barack Obama 
'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett 
 
A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. 
 
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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. 
 
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

Bewilderment

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 
FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR 
 
&lsquo;Extraordinary&rsquo; New York Times 
&lsquo;Remarkable&rsquo; Observer 
&lsquo;Heartfelt&rsquo; Guardian 
 
Theo Byrne is a promising young scientist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. But after a violent outburst from Robin at school, the strength of their close bond will be tested to its limits... 
 
What can a father do, when those around him refuse to understand his rare and troubled child? And how can he reveal to his boy the truth about our beautiful, bewildered world?

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
 
THE BRAND NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY 
 
'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it. . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.' Barack Obama on The Overstory 
'Really, just one of the best novels, period.' Ann Patchett on The Overstory 
'Breathtaking.' Barbara Kingsolver on The Overstory 
_________________________ 
Picked as one of the 'Best Books of 2021' in the Sunday Times 
 
Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade, for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos. 
 
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, while all the while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one. 
_________________________ 
'The best book I've read in 10 years. A remarkable piece of literature ... a lodestone.' Emma Thompson on The Overstory 
 
'Radical and exciting.' Jessie Burton on The Overstory 
 
'A remarkable piece of fiction.' New York Times on The Overstory 
 
'An extraordinary novel.' Guardian on The Overstory 
 
© Richard Powers 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

Both touching and finely written

Deftly crafted . . . packs an emotional punch

Heartfelt . . . with fantastical digressions to other planets and a rueful celebration of our own

Powers has the rare gift of being able to deal with big ideas while keeping you interested in the lives and emotions of his characters

Beautiful and thoughtfully written

A compelling story about love in a dying world

It is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message

Powers is . . . a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Extraordinary . . . Powers's insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination

Remarkable . . . channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors

Mingling ideas about neurodivergence, astrobiology, political radicalisation and environmental collapse... There is no question that Powers is a novelist of considerable, well, powers.... Bewilderment is both touching and finely written

Reading a Powers novel is like boarding a tour bus when you have a single day to explore an unfamiliar city. Bewilderment, his Booker-longlisted new novel, is a hop-on, hop-off trip around astrobiology, climate breakdown and neuro-feedback therapy... it is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message

Powers is a former computer programmer whose ideas-rich fiction grounds the grandest scientific concepts in everyday experience. For him, environmental crisis means that we must share the pain not just of fellow-humans but other life-forms threatened by our botched stewardship of Earth.... Powers's unchained imagination stretches its empathy circle from lichen to nebulae, in finely crafted prose

Powers has the rare gift of being able to deal with big ideas while keeping you interested in the lives and emotions of his characters

A heartfelt cry for climate awareness, with fantastical digressions to other planets and a rueful celebration of our own

It's a wonderful story - taut, touching and wholehearted

A beautiful and thoughtfully written novel

Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality.... channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac... Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment's primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence.

It's deftly crafted, packs an emotional punch, and Powers's urgent environmental message, delivered by the Greta Thunberg-like Robin, comes through loud and clear

Powers is extremely good at creating a very specific emotion in the reader: a potent mix of sadness and guilt. He's also a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Bewilderment is a compelling story about love in a dying world

Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality

It is a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to eco-biology... Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action

One of our most lavishly gifted writers

It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book

With its first few pages, Powers' novel completely captivated us and with its last, it bowled us over. Powers creates a texture and specificity to our future that feels simultaneously sweepingly large and breathtakingly intimate, told through the most relatable point of view: the ferocious love of a parent for his child and his struggle to provide him a better tomorrow.

Leigh Kittay, Black Bear’s Head of Film

On The Overstory: It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.

On The Overstory: Really, just one of the best novels, period

On The Overstory: Monumental . . . breath-taking . . . a gigantic fable of genuine truths

On The Overstory: Exhilarating . . . on almost every page you will find sentences that combine precision and vision

On The Overstory: The best book I've read in ten years. A remarkable piece of literature

On The Overstory: An extraordinary novel . . . an astonishing performance . . . he is incredibly good at turning science into poetry

The success of the story - and a success it is - comes not from the ingenious scientific speculations, nor the shrewd literary connections (on the "emotional telepathy" of a work of art, or Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon), but the human story between father and son, as Theo finds out 'how my brain learns to resemble what it loves

Richard Powers's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is both brutal and heartwarming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, quietly building to an inevitable and devastating close

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

In Bewilderment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist has crafted a story of great beauty and power

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
 
THE BRAND NEW NOVEL FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING, BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE OVERSTORY 
 
'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it. . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.' Barack Obama on The Overstory 
'Really, just one of the best novels, period.' Ann Patchett on The Overstory 
'Breathtaking.' Barbara Kingsolver on The Overstory 
_________________________ 
Picked as one of the 'Best Books of 2021' in the Sunday Times 
 
Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade, for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos. 
 
What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, while all the while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one. 
_________________________ 
'The best book I've read in 10 years. A remarkable piece of literature ... a lodestone.' Emma Thompson on The Overstory 
 
'Radical and exciting.' Jessie Burton on The Overstory 
 
'A remarkable piece of fiction.' New York Times on The Overstory 
 
'An extraordinary novel.' Guardian on The Overstory

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, an enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science

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

Powers has triumphantly restored...the philosophical novel

An enthralling story about desire, new love and the mysteries of science from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory 
 
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant 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 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. 
 
‘A love story of charm and substance, brimming over with ideas, yet anchored in emotional truth’ Sunday Telegraph

A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most 'prodigiously talented' (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe 
 
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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. 
 
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe. 
 
'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett 
 
'The best book I've read in ten years' Emma Thompson 
 
'Dazzlingly written' Robert Macfarlane 
 
© Richard Powers 2018 (P) Penguin Audio 2018

The best book I've read in ten years. It's a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change...

Dazzlingly written... Among the best novels I've read this decade

A novel about the natural world - trees specifically - and our power as human beings to destroy it or redeem it. It reminds me that we are all connected and that there is still time to make things right

TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage

An extraordinary novel... It's an astonishing performance... The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference

Should be mandatory reading the world over

On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision. You will learn new facts about trees... [An] exhilarating read

One of the most thoughtful and involving novels I've read for years... Extraordinary

Absolutely blown away by this epic, heartbreaking novel about us and trees

EMMA DONOGHUE, author of Room and The Pull of the Stars

[A] majestic redwood of a novel... Combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees... It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope

A rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel... It will change the way you look at trees

Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.

[The Overstory is] the best book I’ve read in ten years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet. We’ve got lots and lots of trees where we live in Scotland. If I’m feeling unwell or unsettled in any way, I always go and sit with a tree or walk through the trees, and that’s incredibly healing and helpful

An extraordinary novel … It’s an astonishing performance …He’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry …The book is full of ideas … Like Moby-Dick, The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference … Some of what was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down. Which is one test of the quality of a novel.

The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees as Moby-Dick does about whales … The Overstory is that novel and it is very nearly a masterpiece ... The encyclopaedic powers of Powers extend from the sciences to the literary classics. On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision. You will learn new facts about trees ... [An] exhilarating read.

[The Overstory] whirls together so many characters, so much research and such a jostle of intersecting ideas that, at times, it feels like a landbound companion to Moby-Dick’s digressional and obsessive whale tale ... One of the most thoughtful and involving novels I’ve read for years ... This long book is astonishingly light on its feet, and its borrowings from real research are conducted with verve ... The propulsive style and the enthusiastic reverence of Powers’s writing about nature keep it whizzing through any amount of linked observations on literary criticism, political science and statistical analysis. It’s an extraordinary novel, alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones; in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures, it blossoms.

Big brainy books bristling with formidable versatility have been Powers’s speciality since he launched his highly idiosyncratic fictional career ... The Overstory is a hugely ambitious eco-fable ... An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world, the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument ... [Pages] teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal. Angry energy pulses through scenes ... Valiant.

During these weeks of being shut-in, I have revisited The Overstory by Richard Powers. It's a novel about the natural world – trees specifically – and our power as human beings to destroy it or redeem it. It reminds me that we are all connected and that there is still time to make things right

Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

I have thought about The Overstory ever since reading it last year… For me, what was so radical and exciting about this novel was the fact that the trees are probably more important than the human beings who trundle around them causing chaos. It was the first “eco-lit” novel I’ve read that made me stop and truly realise how sophisticated trees are, how magisterially brilliant. And, in a world where finally, collectively, we are acknowledging the threat of climate crisis, it reminded me of how important they are to the planet’s survival

No less a writer than Margaret Atwood has said of Richard Powers that “it’s not possible for him to write an uninteresting book”. On the evidence of The Overstory, he is continuing a remarkable run … This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own … Written with a freshness that belies the well-worn subject matter … As befits a book that spans centuries, there is a richness and allusiveness to the prose that reaches back as far as Thoreau’s Walden, and Emerson is an acknowledged touchstone. The Overstory is high-minded but never precious … [A] majestic redwood of a novel … It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope. As with Larkin, a belief that humanity is capable of redeeming itself and beginning “afresh, afresh, afresh”.

His monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt … The Overstory is a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink … The opener is a gorgeous family saga with the texture of a Ken Burns documentary … we’re in the hands of Richard Powers, winner of a genius grant, a storyteller of such grand scope that Margaret Atwood was moved to ask: “If Powers were an American writer of the 19th century, which writer would he be? He’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby Dick.” His picture really is that big … Trees will bring these small lives together into large acts of war, love, loyalty and betrayal … The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 feet up, stand with any prose I’ve ever read … The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters … who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways … This is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friend, lovers, parents and children.

The Great American Novel has been written many times. From Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) to Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), American authors have produced works of sweeping grandeur that attempt to capture a people at a point in history. Yet these national epics have — you might conclude after reading The Overstory — failed to see the wood for the trees. … Richard Powers’ 12th novel is a rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel … Yet the literary greats that really inform Powers’ thinking and writing are the Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, as well as the metaphysical poets … But the great literary tap root that grounds his sprawling novel is Ovid’s The Metamorphoses … The great fork that took us away from our natural environment and other living things, that led us to a place where we have unthinkingly destroyed forest after forest and species after species must be challenged, argues Powers, and challenged through stories. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind,” he writes. “The only thing that can do that is a good story.” This is a good story. It will change the way you look at trees.

Renews romanticism for the contemporary age; making space for the sentimental to breathe freely again, and challenging us not to be afraid to care … Powers’s mission is urgent: not only are we living through an age where science is rewriting what comprises consciousness, but we are simultaneously exploiting non-human life to an unprecedented extent … Powers’s place as one of the few established writers longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize is well deserved. ... And if Powers himself was a tree, it would surely be a mature oak, for The Overstory displays the kind of abundant creativity that restores faith in human endeavour.

[A] rich literary canopy … Powers, one of a remarkable generation of polymathic American novelists including William T. Vollmann and the late David Foster Wallace, has produced a brilliant encyclopaedic [novel] … A rich entanglement of discourses, disciplines, data, characters and styles, mirroring the most biodiverse ecosystem.

In his extraordinary 12th novel, Powers follows nine characters whose lives are bound up with the beauty, history, science, mythos and heedless destruction of trees … Passionately ecological in its themes, the novel doesn’t hammer at them. The green message becomes a natural element borne eloquently through the narrative.

This eco-epic has affected me as no novel has for many years … The book brings to life the greatest problems of our time – climate change and biodiversity collapse – and gets under the skin in a way that just reading about the science doesn’t always manage … The structure of the book, meshing and connecting and interweaving, is explicitly and implicitly about ecology. But as rich and compelling as the human lives are, the trees are the stars. Powers conveys wonder about the natural world and an extraordinary depth of ecological insight: it’s this which makes the novel so powerful … The Overstory has already been compared to Moby Dick. It is to trees what Herman Melville’s epic is to whales in that it changes our understanding of our relationship to a natural resource … The Overstory is a profound work … This is the first time I’ve read a novel that manages to celebrate and warn about the natural world in such a compelling and affecting way. It’s changed the way I look at trees, and I loved trees to begin with. We are being engulfed by an ecological crisis of our own making, which gives this book an urgency you should not resist.

A story about trees, nature and people, and the complicated relationships that hold the world together. Layered and intricate, it’s a wonderful epic … It’s a beautiful, brilliant and involving book, with a vital message at its heart.

Operatic … a novel devoted to “reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment”.

It can change the way you think about trees slightly, and it certainly did for me.

The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer.

This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.

A magnificent saga of lives aligned with the marvels of trees, the intricacy and bounty of forests, and their catastrophic destruction under the onslaught of humanity’s ever-increasing population … A virtuoso at parallel narratives ... gripping… Powers’ sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet’s life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations … [A] profound and symphonic novel.

Here is a big, brave, ambitious novel… The writing is breathtaking, the message is devastating. This book will fill you with wonder.

Formidably forks through time and place as it considers how best to care for our world.

An astonishingly rich book. Rich in ideas and imagination. Rich in drama, wisdom and truly illuminating facts about trees.

Alert to the large ideas and generous to the small ones; in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures, it blossoms.

Brilliant at the futility of human action.

A masterpiece of operatic proportions … What Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves … A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.

You will careen through this book. The prose is driven. You don’t really get to draw breath … The writing is steel-edged, laser-sharp when Richard Powers wants it to be. When he sets out to nail meaning, it’s done. There are sentences you return to and wonder at.

This walk through the woods via words is a passionate paean to the natural world that prompts us to appreciate afresh our place on the planet.

[I]t’s huge, it’s exciting, it’s wondrous … This really deserves to be read.

The Overstory is a book you learn from.

Dazzlingly written… Among the best novels I’ve read this decade… Despite its deep-time perspective, it could hardly be more of-the-moment

A beautiful novel about humans reconnecting with nature in a fascinatingly, inventive world with colourful, rich characters, it will rekindle your love for nature

Richard Powers

Praise for Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

An outstanding novel

A first novel of intricate merit... A rich imagination glitters throughout

Unexpected and richly imaginative ... Full of intellectual descriptions and stylistic diversions

An outstanding novel

A first novel of intricate merit... A rich imagination glitters throughout

Unexpected and richly imaginative ... Full of intellectual descriptions and stylistic diversions

An outstanding novel

A first novel of intricate merit... A rich imagination glitters throughout

Unexpected and richly imaginative ... Full of intellectual descriptions and stylistic diversions

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