Publisher Description

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Overstory, an enthralling, wrenching novel about the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identitiesFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, an enthralling, wrenching novel about the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities.Jonah, Ruth and Joseph are the children of mixed-race parents determined to raise them beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. Yet they cannot be protected from the world forever.Even as Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, the opera arena remains fixated on his race. Ruth turns her back on classical music and disappears, dedicating herself to activism and a new relationship. As the years pass, Joseph - the middle child, a pianist and our narrator - must battle not just to remain connected to his siblings, but to forge a future of his own.This is a story of the tragedy of race in America, told through the lives and choices of one family caught on the cusp of identities.'An epic novel of modern America that weaves ideas of race, music and science into a mysterious but satisfying tapestry... Endlessly fascinating' Independent

Notes

A superb contemporary take on the issue of race in America, following the lives of three siblings and their struggle for identity in predominantly white strata. "A serious work, never less than considered and thought-provoking" Daily Telegraph

Author Biography

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory and his most recent novel, Bewilderment, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Review

There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers... It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this * Guardian *
Formidable...rewarding * Sunday Times *
An epic novel of modern America that weaves ideas of race, music and science into a mysterious but satisfying tapestry... Endlessly fascinating * Independent *
A great hurtle of a book, telling several powerful stories at once... Strangely subtle and moving...an astonishing performance... Prodigious, illuminating and exhilarating * New York Times *

Promotional

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Overstory, an enthralling, wrenching novel about the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities

Kirkus UK Review

This is a book to take your breath away, so powerful that its ideas and imagination fire the reader's mind. Powers has taken a mixed-race couple, a black woman and a German Jewish immigrant, to tell the story of race in America. The man is a physicist obsessed with the definition of time and the woman is a singer. Music and time, the twin themes of the novel, allow him to return again and again to a subject or a scene, to take a jump into the past or the future. The end meets the beginning with a small black boy lost in the crowd near the statue of Abraham Lincoln during Marian Anderson's concert in 1939 and, in the closing pages, the same small boy disappears into the millions attending a meeting led by Farrakhan. In between there is the obscene illegality of mixed marriages, the savage cruelty and inequality leading to the civil rights movement, the rise of black power and the subsequent imprisonment of the Panthers and, described with shattering immediacy, there are the bloody race riots. David and Delia believe that 'the bird and the fish can marry' but this act of faith leaves their children labelled 'mulatto' or 'mule', the butt of discrimination and gibes from black and white. One son embraces classical music and defends his right to plunder what is beautiful in the European heritage while another tries to understand each and every kind of music so that all people might sing. 'Time', argues Powers, 'doesn't flow but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. In such a world who we are must be all things.' No concessions are made to the reader who must wrestle with long explanations of quantum physics and subtle descriptions of harmony and dissonance. The triumph of this writing is that the novel's traditional form is woven so tightly with the philosophical ideas that every page is a welcome discovery and a joy. (Kirkus UK)

Review Text

There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers... It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this

Review Quote

There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers... It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this

Promotional "Headline"

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Overstory , an enthralling, wrenching novel about the lives and choices of one family, caught on the cusp of identities

Details