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Bewilderment

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.

The brand new novel from the Pulitzer prize-winning, booker prize-shortlisted author of The Overstory.

Picked as one of the Best Books of 2021 in the Sunday Times.

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, while all the while fostering his son's desperate campaign to help save this one.

©2021 Richard Powers (P)2021 Penguin Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Space Exploration Interstellar Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Thought-Provoking Tear-jerking Solar System
All stars
Most relevant
I only discovered Powers quite recently and now I'm moving backwards and forwards through his catalogue, always surprised, never disappointed.
Bewilderment is a thing of beauty. Thoughtful, thought-provoking, joyful, heart-wrenchingly sad, inventive, inspiring. I love a lot of fiction but at 60yo, Powers has turned me into a raging, frothing fan-boy.

Brilliant Powers

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Loved this book, a critical look at the world we live in through the eyes of a troubled 9 year old.

Topical, satirical, thought-provoking

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I struggled with the length of the Overstory, so this appealed as something much shorter but in a similar style. In both novels Powers deals with climate activism and human response to this, but where Overstory was a woven epic, this is a more simple and heartbreaking tale of a parent and child’s inability to make sense of the world as it is. I sobbed for the last ten minutes of the book.

Devastating

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Clever, powerful, thought provoking. Deeply moving story of father and son trying to navigate grief and loss on a planetary as well as personal scale. Found narrator’s style a little odd at first but quickly learned to love it.

Brilliant

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Beautiful performance and brilliant book. Should be required listening but is also quite devastating and so I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it exactly

Extremely relevant and painful

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