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Bewilderment cover art

Bewilderment

By: Richard Powers
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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Summary

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

What listeners say about Bewilderment

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Brilliant Powers

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.

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5 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars

Think and think again

The story of a child endowed with too much empathy to cope in this world.

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4 people found this helpful

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Poignant and moving

...and so much more succinct than Overstory. A near future that feels nearer every day.

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2 people found this helpful

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Beautifully poignant

Part eco story, part exploration of fatherhood, part wonderment about the endless possibilities in the universe. Movingly thoughtful and softly narrated.

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2 people found this helpful

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Brilliant but so very sad.

So brilliant. But so desperately sad. Grief in all its forms. Amazingly written and with such in depth research.

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1 person found this helpful

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Devastating

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.

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Topical, satirical, thought-provoking

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

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A book that forces you to reexamine our existance

A story that tugs at your hearstrings and lights a fire of frustration that the reader shares with a child who sees the world brimming with animal and plant life, yet is left agog at the destruction we humans persist in imparting on our dying plantet. Well written, with perseptive observations from both a bereaved father and son's views of the world.

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1 person found this helpful

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Every belief will be outgrown in time

This is the poignant tale of a widowed astrophysicist raising his son that explores the inner and outer realms of life, the universe and everything. The scariest part is witnessing a too believable future shaped by Trumpian ideology in which consumerism and populism determine decision making in the 'endless American civil war'. The bewilderment of the title refers to what we are doing to the planet and each other.

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Bleak

Took me months to finish, as kept putting it down in favour of other books, sorry but it’s the opposite of gripping.

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