Bewilderment

A Novel

By: Richard Powers

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

An Oprah's Book Club Selection

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction

A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.

I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it goes from non-existent to the country's most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there's something wrong....

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

"Richard Powers is one of our country’s greatest living writers. He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. I’m in awe of his talent." (Oprah Winfrey)

©2021 Richard Powers (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Richard Powers is one of our country’s greatest living writers. He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. I’m in awe of his talent." —Oprah Winfrey

"Extraordinary.…Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet." —Tracy K. Smith, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"A heartrending tale of loss.…Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes." —Heller McAlpin, NPR

Required Reading... A Modern Classic

What a phenomenal read! Incively brilliant, and a powerful commentary on both the world, humanity and the things that matter.

Ultimately a story about a father, Theo, left alone with his special child... "in no way is he deficit, and he certainly doesn't have a disorder", yet Robin is not a normal child. While prone to aggression and a tempermental nature, Robin has a pure love of science and nature. Without Theo's wife Aly, lost under tragic circumstances, it seems his life is falling apart until a new study treating behavioral conditions creates a remarkable change in Robin, but at what cost?

A story about heart and connections, this should be mandatory reading for all of us. Powers does a masterful job of weaving a social, ecological and emotional web that draws us in and shows us just how far humanity has come from a rational, positive race... as well as the way back, thru the eyes of a boy, a bird (flying backwards) and the universe.

Fascinating and flawed-as we all are

I adored the Overstory. I was pulled into this book even though it is more linear, more polemical, perhaps less well written. I was challenged, engaged and believe Bewilderment is an important book to read and discuss.

Nature and nurture

This is such a powerful story of love and respect for life. Powers writes such amazing characters, and stories. A plea to see what is right in front of us.

Wonderful story, excellent narrator

I enjoyed listening to every minute of this book. The characters were well developed, the story is well written and unique. The narration added to it.

Absolutely fabulous!

Delightful! Richard Powers is a master story teller with a limitless line into the essence of the best of humanity, while reminding us of all the horrors that we face. A story of optimism and hope, determination with sheer joy in learning and the wonderment of the world.

Flowers for Algernon reimagined for our time

The performance is superb. The story is good, but there are many loose ends that never get resolved, and left me wondering why the author introduced them in the first place. It's a relatively short listen that didn't really engage me until about chapter 26, but it was ultimately worth it.

what a different point of view

I enjoyed this novel. Like Overstory it was long with intersecting plots. At times it was a bit slow, however this father's love for his son and the wonders of science kept me going. It could have gone on for a few more chapters!

Stunningly beautiful and thoughtful

This book was unique, difficult at times, and beautiful. Richard Powers is immensely impressive. I was so sad to have to say good-bye to these characters. To say anymore could ruin another’s experience of this book. It is very much worth the journey.

Everyone needs this kind of understanding.

Too sad and inspiring. This has to be a fairy tale. Happy sad ending.

I adored. I cried.

The beauty of this authors words felt like I was reading this book in the middle of the Milky Way. I’ve already purchased two copies for separate friends and recommended this book immediately to my social media feeds. It’s one of those books that you enjoyed so much you want to talk about it with somebody else. I got to the end of this book and started bawling my eyes out crying at a red light knowing that the car next to me was looking at me wondering what the heck was going on. What an absolutely gorgeous read!