Best Selling Books by Richard Powers

AN OPRAH''S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant New York Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List Named One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS PRIZE From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure. When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths. Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go. Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Gain tells two parallel stories: one, of Laura Bodey, divorced mother of two and successful real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, who one day discovers that she has ovarian cancer; and two, of Clare Soap & Chemical, the company begun by three merchant brothers in 19th-century Boston, which by the turn of the century has grown into a large multiconglomerate with factories in Laura''s hometown. As the history of Clare Soap changes through the history of America, so a modern-day Laura Bodey descends into a battle with her terminal illness. By the novel''s conclusion, we have learned how the largest enterprises affect us on the most personal level.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory, an emotionally charged novel inspired by the myth of Orpheus. "Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter." —Heller McAlpin, NPR In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab—the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns—has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a 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.

“The last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.” - Marlon James, Elle From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah''s Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers''s magnificent, multifaceted novel about a supremely gifted—and divided—family, set against the backdrop of postwar America. On Easter day, 1939, at Marian Anderson’s epochal concert on the Washington Mall, David Strom, a German Jewish émigré scientist, meets Delia Daley, a young Black Philadelphian studying to be a singer. Their mutual love of music draws them together, and—against all odds and their better judgment—they marry. They vow to raise their children beyond time, beyond identity, steeped only in song. Jonah, Joseph, and Ruth grow up, however, during the civil rights era, coming of age in the violent 1960s, and living out adulthood in the racially retrenched late century. Jonah, the eldest, “whose voice could make heads of state repent,” follows a life in his parents’ beloved classical music. Ruth, the youngest, devotes herself to community activism and repudiates the white culture her brother represents. Joseph, the middle child and the narrator of this generation-bridging tale, struggles to find himself and remain connected to them both. Richard Powers''s The Time of Our Singing is a story of self-invention, allegiance, race, cultural ownership, the compromised power of music, and the tangled loops of time that rewrite all belonging.

A national bestseller, voted by Time as the #1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Playground . " Plowing the Dark is virtual reality composed in a language that will never go obsolete." —Kevin Berger, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet. Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. "Superb . . . Powers pulls off one of the most astonishing feats I''ve ever seen in literature . . . daring, unpredictable, and emotionally powerful." —Steven Moore, The Washington Post Book World "A fiercely visual book . . . the effect is spectacular . . . The most visceral prose Powers has ever written." —Daniel Zalewski, The New York Times Book Review "I don''t have the space to do justice to all the wonders of craftsmanship in Plowing the Dark . . . This is the first emblematic novel of the 21st century, a lesson and an inspiration." —Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times

After four novels and several years of living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he falls afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in English literature. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing. Powers drills it in Chaucer and Austen and James, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master''s candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete.

Highly imaginative and emotionally powerful, this stunning novel about childhood innocence amid the nightmarish disease and deterioration at the heart of modern Los Angeles was nominated for a National Book Award.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author''s "provocative . . . dazzling" novel delves into the possibilities and consequences of finding the genetic basis for happiness (Ron Charles, The Washington Post). A refugee from the Algerian civil war, Thassadit Amzwar has not only survived terrible trauma, but also emerged from it with an unflagging sense of joy and optimism. Could it be that her infectious joy—which has inspired her fellow creative nonfiction students at the Mesquakie College of Art—is rooted in a genetic condition known as hyperthymia? When her condition captures the public imagination—and the attention of a pioneering geneticist—events are set in motion that bring profound questions into focus. What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Three tales intertwine around a photo of three young men on the brink of WWI in this literary debut by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory. In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers''s brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress. Praise for Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "An obsessive, witty, moving, often electrifying whale of a book about nothing less than the twentieth century. . . . An auspicious debut." — Kirkus Reviews "A scintillating, high-octane intellectual flight of fancy." — Newsday "One of the few younger American writers who can stake a claim to the legacy of Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo." —Gerald Howard , The Nation "Bristlingly intelligent. . . . Powers is a superb writer." — Chicago Tribune "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." —Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

Winner of the National Book Award From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the Oprah''s Book Club selection Bewilderment comes Richard Powers''s The Echo Maker, a powerful novel about family and loss. “Wise and elegant . . . The mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition . . . Powers accomplishes something magnificent.” —Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman—who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister—is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world and everything that''s in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner''s Dilemma is a story of the power of invalid experience.