Galatea 2.2

Galatea 2.2

Summary

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

Reviews

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

About the author

Richard Powers

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more