Editions

Galatea 2.2

Galatea 2.2

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

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

    New York Times

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

    Daily Telegraph

  • It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book... If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big

    New York Review of Books

  • An extraordinary and brilliant novel of ideas

    Time Out

More from this Author

About the Author

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Richard Powers

Read more

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News

Daisy Johnson, Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2018

Three Penguin Random House books have made it onto the shortlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize; making up half of the six-strong list.
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Extracts

The Overstory by Richard Powers

'That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.' Read an extract from Richard Powers’ monumental novel, The Overstory.

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