Bewilderment

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER 2021 PRIZE

'It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book'
Margaret Atwood

Theo Byrne is a promising young scientist 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 school for smashing his friend's face with a 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, all while fostering his son's desperate attempt to save this one.

At the heart of Bewilderment lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

'Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality.... 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. It's also a ghostly and affecting love story... We are into the terrain here of myth, metaphysics and religion. Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment's primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence.... Robin is as compelling a fictional creation as I've encountered in some time - fierce, lovable and otherworldly. In dreaming him up, Powers was clearly working out a bold fictive question: what must it be like to father a Greta Thunberg?'
Rob Doyle, The Observer

'Nothing less than brilliant'
John Updike