Booker Prize shortlisted – Bewilderment by Richard Powers

A magnificent new novel by Richard Powers, his first novel since the Booker Prize-shortlisted, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory.

Picked as one of the 'Best Books of 2021' in the Sunday Times

An astrobiologist thinks of a creative way to help his rare and troubled son in Richard Powers’ deeply moving and brilliantly original novel.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos.

What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs? What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world? The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.

Meet the Author:

Richard Powers

The astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment – two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions – are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions

The Overstory, shortlisted in 2018, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours.

Powers says he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet.

He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and is currently delving into ‘what social media, deep learning, hidden algorithms, and surprisingly intelligent marine creatures have to do with one another.’

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