The essential Richard Powers reading list...
Richard Powers (Author)
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022
FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR
‘Extraordinary’ New York Times
‘Remarkable’ Observer
‘Heartfelt’ 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?
Richard Powers (Author)
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.
Richard Powers (Author)
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
Richard Powers (Author)
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
Richard Powers (Author)
'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 (Author)
'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
Richard Powers (Author)
‘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.
Richard Powers (Author)
'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.
