Publisher Description

From Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory, Richard Powers's Gain braids together two stories on very different scales.
In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura's hometown. Clare's stunning growth reflects the kaleidoscopic history of America; Laura Body's life is changed forever by Clare.
Gain's stunning conclusion reveals the countless invisible connections between the largest enterprises and the smallest lives.

Author Biography

RICHARD POWERS is the author of a dozen novels, including The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains

Review

"Powers is a writer of blistering intellect." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "[Gain] is erudite, penetrating and splendidly written." --Bruce Bawer, The New York Times Book Review "Richard Powers has proven himself a visionary writer." --Greil Marcus, The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle "Gain only confirms that Powers is, in fact, a major American novelist." --Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

Review Quote

Richard Powers has proven himself a visionary writer.

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