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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

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.

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.

Richard Powers

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

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

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

If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big

'An outstanding novel' Observer 
 
'A writer of blistering intellect' Los Angeles Times 
 
'Unexpected and richly imaginative' London Review of Books 
 
'A first novel of intricate merit ... A rich imagination glitters throughout' Mail on Sunday 
In the spring of 1914, German photographer August Sander captures a haunting image: three young men on their way to a country dance, themselves unknowingly on the brink of the First World War. This photograph becomes the focal point of Richard Powers’ compelling debut novel.The fate of the three farmers is intertwined with two contemporary stories: a museum-goer becomes obsessed with the photograph, and a young writer in Boston discovers he has a personal connection to it. Seamlessly blended together, these three narratives depict a century scarred by savagery and fired by progress.

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

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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