Overview

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?

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9781324036142

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Reviews

Richard Powers is one of our country's greatest living writers. He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent. -- Oprah Winfrey Extraordinary....Powers's insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet. -- Tracy K. Smith, New York Times Book Review (cover review) A heartrending tale of loss....Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes. -- Heller McAlpin - NPR Nothing short of transportive. -- Newsweek [A]stounding....a must-read novel....It's urgent and profound and takes readers on a unique journey that will leave them questioning what we're doing to the only planet we have. -- Rob Merrill - Associated Press As in The Overstory, Powers seamlessly yet indelibly melds science and humanity, hope and despair. -- Dale Singer - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Bewilderment is a big book about what matters most....a brilliant, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking book. -- David Laskin - Seattle Times [P]oignant...Bewilderment is a cri de coeur....this is a hauntingly intimate story set within the privacy of one family trapped in the penumbra of mourning. -- Ron Charles - Washington Post You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit.... It is enchanting, and it is devastating. -- Ezra Klein - The Ezra Klein Show Immersive and astonishing....Powers captures the tragedy of a species that could, but perhaps won't, become a lasting part of a cosmic menagerie. But in this absorbing and effortlessly readable tale he seems to have also found uplifting poetry in our despair. -- Caleb Scharf - Nautilus A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of 'invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. -- The New Yorker In Bewilderment, [Powers's] mastery strikes a new vein....it raises goosebumps and breaks our hearts. -- John Domini - The Brooklyn Rail Achingly current and wise. -- Bethanne Patrick - Washington Post [Powers] wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live. -- Alexandra Alter - New York Times Remarkable.... Bewilderment channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac. -- Rob Doyle - The Guardian One of America's most ambitious and imaginative novelists.... In a year of unprecedented worldwide drought, fire, and flooding, [Bewilderment] couldn't be timelier.... Whether concerning family or nature, this heart-rending tale warns us to take nothing for granted. -- Alexander C. Kafka - Boston Globe The tenderness between father and son seem[s] so real and heartfelt that the novel becomes its own empathy machine. What's more powerful, though, is how the emotions Bewilderment evokes expand far beyond the bond of father and son to embrace the living world. -- Ellen Atkins - Minneapolis Star Tribune Powers [has] an emotional core to everything he writes, and this sets him apart from nearly everyone. -- David Yaffe - Air Mail An unabashed tearjerker.... The most moving and inspiring of all Powers's books. -- Gish Jen - The New Republic Intimate....Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change. -- Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality. -- The Economist

Author Information

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

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