Bewilderment

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AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB SELECTION An Instant 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 best-selling author of . 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. Extraordinary.…Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet. A heartrending tale of loss.…Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes. Nothing short of transportive. [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. As in , Powers seamlessly yet indelibly melds science and humanity, hope and despair. is a big book about what matters most.…a brilliant, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking book. [P]oignant… is a cri de coeur.…this is a hauntingly intimate story set within the privacy of one family trapped in the penumbra of mourning. 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. 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. A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of ‘invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. In , [Powers’s] mastery strikes a new vein.…it raises goosebumps and breaks our hearts. Achingly current and wise. [Powers] wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live. Remarkable…. channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac. One of America’s most ambitious and imaginative novelists…. In a year of unprecedented worldwide drought, fire, and flooding, [ ] couldn’t be timelier…. Whether concerning family or nature, this heart-rending tale warns us to take nothing for granted. 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 evokes expand far beyond the bond of father and son to embrace the living world. Powers [has] an emotional core to everything he writes, and this sets him apart from nearly everyone. An unabashed tearjerker…. The most moving and inspiring of all Powers’s books. Intimate.…Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change. 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. US

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