Richard Powers

"An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and...

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

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When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won't someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular...

National Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.

"The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow . . . An outright marvel." —Washington

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In the winter of 1983, the largest El Niño event on record, a series of "superstorms," battered the West. That spring, a massive snowmelt sent runoff racing down the Colorado River toward the Glen Canyon Dam. As the water filled the dam, worried federal officials desperately scrambled to avoid a dramatic dam failure. In the midst of this crisis, a trio of river guides secretly launched a small, hand-built wooden boat, a dory named the Emerald Mile,...

"As the last living member of the "Creedish Death Cult," Ted Branson finds himself in a difficult situation as his plane is about to crash, and he turns inward and reflects on the long and difficult life that brought him to where he is today."--from Novelist.

"This intelligent, compassionate and hopeful book" examines an Amish community's extraordinary response to a horrifying act of violence (Publisher's Weekly, starred review).

On October 2, 2006, a gunman named Charles Roberts entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He took ten schoolgirls hostage, killing five and critically wounding the others before taking his own life. To explain his motivation,...

"A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word"--

A "skillful and literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his...

Returning unannounced to his dilapidated family home on Maine's Monhegan Island, rakish prodigal son Spark launches an unforgettable summer marked by his temperamental son's claims about a spiritual vision, which is exploited by his grandfather to revive a flagging church.