Bewilderment: A Novel

Bewilderment: A Novel

by Richard Powers

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

Unabridged — 7 hours, 51 minutes

Bewilderment: A Novel

Bewilderment: A Novel

by Richard Powers

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

Unabridged — 7 hours, 51 minutes

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Overview

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction

A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.

I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it goes from non-existent to the country's most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there's something wrong....

Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.

What can a father do, when the only solution offered to his rare and troubled boy is to put him on psychoactive drugs? What can he say when his boy comes to him wanting an explanation for a world that is clearly in love with its own destruction? The only thing for it is to take the boy to other planets, even while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one.

"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

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Listeners will hear the frustration of a father who is trying to help his special-needs son in Edoardo Ballerini’s narration. There’s also quite a bit of amazement and admiration, too. Ballerini captures both the otherworldly thoughtfulness and the tantrums of son Robin, as well. Powers brings out the situation gradually, and Ballerini keeps listeners’ attention as the Pulitzer Prize-winning story unfolds, showing listeners the changes that take place in Robin as he undergoes experimental brainwave therapy. Even when describing the commotion at an airport, Ballerini remains soft-spoken, yet he puts listeners into the middle of the stressful scene. The story is expanded when Robin’s environmental consciousness takes father and son to Washington, DC, to enter into the political fray of the fast-approaching global crisis. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

The New Republic - Gish Jen

"An unabashed tearjerker....The most moving and inspiring of all Powers’s books."

The Brooklyn Rail - John Domini

"In Bewilderment, [Powers's] mastery strikes a new vein.…it raises goosebumps and breaks our hearts."

Oprah Winfrey

"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."

Associated Press - Rob Merrill

"[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."

Tracy K. Smith

"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."

Boston Globe - Alexander C. Kafka

"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."

Ron Charles

"[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."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Ellen Atkins

"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."

Air Mail - David Yaffe

"Powers [has] an emotional core to everything he writes, and this sets him apart from nearly everyone."

Seattle Times - David Laskin

"Bewilderment is a big book about what matters most.…a brilliant, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking book."

The Economist

"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."

Bethanne Patrick

"Achingly current and wise."

Los Angeles Times - Carolyn Kellogg

"Intimate.…Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change."

The Guardian - Rob Doyle

"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."

The Ezra Klein Show - Ezra Klein

"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."

New York Times - Alexandra Alter

"[Powers] wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Dale Singer

"As in The Overstory, Powers seamlessly yet indelibly melds science and humanity, hope and despair."

Newsweek

"Nothing short of transportive."

The New Yorker

"A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of ‘invisible suffering on unimaginable scales."

NPR - Heller McAlpin

"A heartrending tale of loss.…Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes."

Nautilus - Caleb Scharf

"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."

OCTOBER 2021 - AudioFile

Listeners will hear the frustration of a father who is trying to help his special-needs son in Edoardo Ballerini’s narration. There’s also quite a bit of amazement and admiration, too. Ballerini captures both the otherworldly thoughtfulness and the tantrums of son Robin, as well. Powers brings out the situation gradually, and Ballerini keeps listeners’ attention as the Pulitzer Prize-winning story unfolds, showing listeners the changes that take place in Robin as he undergoes experimental brainwave therapy. Even when describing the commotion at an airport, Ballerini remains soft-spoken, yet he puts listeners into the middle of the stressful scene. The story is expanded when Robin’s environmental consciousness takes father and son to Washington, DC, to enter into the political fray of the fast-approaching global crisis. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID: 2940173165336
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 09/21/2021
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 660,371
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