Thoughtful and wise. It was such a triumph. I learned so much. It was clever, insightful and written with sensitivity and kindness. A remarkable feat.

I really enjoyed the story of Theo the astrobiologist struggling to raise his son Robin who has behavioural issues. It is a moving and thought provoking story & I hope this book moves to the Booker shortlist as the writing is superb. My only issue was sometimes the descriptions of the planets were a bit too detailed.

This is a most intense, extraordinary book about a nine year old boy who is desperate to save the planet. His mother has died and his father is struggling to keep him at school and on an even keel. The chance to take part in an experimental therapy brings elation, fear and bewilderment. The writing is engaging, impactful and truly shocking.

Following the death of his wife two years ago, astrophysicist Theo is raising nine-year-old Robbie alone. Robbie fails to meet his school’s threshold for behavioural standards, and the recommended solution is psychoactive drugs. That is, until the wife’s male friend offers an experimental alternative.

Powers writes with evangelical zeal on the wonder of nature and the universe. At times, this comes across as heavy-handed. Then again, our unsustainable use of Earth’s resources is destroying the living world.

The renaming of real people and organisations, eg. Inga Alder for Greta Thunberg, seems unnecessary and, like the smear on a glass, draws attention to the writer, not the story.

Powers excels at portraying the government’s growing interference in science, the influence of the right-wing on policy, and the climate of fake news.

I usually have an issue with the use of italics in novels. However, here they serve a specific purpose and work well to guide the reader.

Impassioned and affecting.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the ARC.

This is an impassioned novel, dealing with mighty subjects (the politics of an endangered unique planet) in a very near future which feels very much like almost our present. It does so through the story of a widowed astrobiologist and his nine year old son. Despite the undoubted interest of the issues explored and the knowledge imparted and embodied in the main characters (a narrator father looking for life in the universe, his troubled behavioural divergent son, and her iconic, dead environmental activist wife) the actual narrative developed around the father's search for a non-medicated solution to his child's problems was not for me.

I found the plot mechanics repetitive and the tone relentless, rather stern and didactic, whilst the actual drama left me weirdly cold as I did not really engage with the narrator's tribulations. The text is clearly a good summary of the problems facing our planet right now and that few of us seem to actually want to confront properly, from the populist philistinism of politicians and a steadily eroded democracy, to the ever-present dehumanising powerful media, to the plight of dying species and an endangered planet at large. Obviously the crucial problem which is treated as the conundrum and metaphor par excellence of our dismal situation is the growing number of angry, troubled children who seem to "need" to be medicated... Bewilderment at human ingenuity and ignorance, at the beauty and uniqueness of our world...

Thank you so much to Penguin Random House via NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this topical novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of this book.

I absolutely loved this book - utterly captivating from start to finish. The writing is precise, considered, but hugely heartfelt. There's a tremendous amount of warmth for the characters and, considering the subject matter, there's a strong vein of humour throughout.

The relationship between Robbie and Theo is drawn with great specificity and sensitivity. Their journeys back to one an another, after the death of Robbie's mother, is beautifully told. I was moved on more than one occasion, especially by Theo's struggle to communicate with his son.

I found the lyrical descriptions of the planets they both visit captivating, and haunting. I've read a number of climate change novels, and often find them so laden with doom that it's almost impossible to keep reading. Richard Powers manages to balance the sense of looming catastrophe with a great deal of levity - the journeys to other planets are magical and transportive.

I found the last act of the novel really quite upsetting, unexpectedly so. Part of me wondered whether the denouement was entirely necessary. It felt a little more savage than the rest of the book, though I understand why the plot moves in the direction it does.

All in al, it more than earns its place on the Booker Longlist. It's a book I am sure I will return to, and one that lives long in the memory. I've not stopped thinking about it since I've finished it. A beautiful, utterly captivating, haunting work.

Firstly, thank you for selecting me for an early copy of this wonderful book - I got through it in under a week. Nonetheless, reading through the other reviews I'm noting a possible issue with the scientific references contained within its pages. However, as a feature writer for one of the world's leading scientific websites, I can assure you that any science-based passages are in their most basic terms and are, therefore, not in any way overwhelming. It is clear that these beautiful imaginations of alien planets are a metaphor for a parent of a special needs child desperately trying to find a world accepting of his son, Robin, who is on the Autism spectrum.

We watch as our protagonist, Theo Byrne, attempts to terraform the world around him for his child, coming to the slow realization that he must terraform his child with special needs to adapt to a cold and alien world that mostly limits the less-abled. And due to the harsh, clumsy old-fashioned therapeutics chemically coshing these kids, terraform is the right word here. With only a minute number of evolved treatments and technologies in the pipeline for these deserted children, making for a heartbreaking (and sometimes frustrating) read.

Through neglectful parenting, we see Robin's parents fighting for the rights of everything on the planet apart from disabled people. This is all done to the backdrop of human rights atrocities and breaches that go ignored - complicitly accepted by our avid animal rights campaigners. This common situational theme, veined throughout the book, also begs the question: why would the world treat animals as equal, sentient beings when it mostly has a hard job of accepting its fellow humans as equal, sentient beings? Particularly where said fellow humans warrant special needs.

And as Robin's behavior understandably becomes progressively worse after the death of his mother and the apparent lack of any cognitive or behavioral therapy, we see his father ignore these dangerous flags, preferring to blame an uncaring world. This is all done while claiming grade A parenting status by refusing chemical intervention or advice from any other person on the planet. A planet that becomes as starkly isolated and alien as the many fictional worlds Theo creates for his son every night.

This beautifully written book expertly explores the dichotomy of parenting an autistic child, well aware of the reality and ease most parents have accepted drug regimes into their young children's lives. Regimes that can, at times, supplant for one-on-one time and long-term therapy treatments. That's not to say these therapeutics are not sometimes warranted, but just how strong are the doses now being given to our children? Moreover, how aware of the world with no interest in updating antiquated therapies for these children is this mini Prozac nation? And even more importantly: just how aware is the world of these Adderall-subjugated children?

Power's writing is textured and emotional, as he takes us on an exploration of isolated worlds throughout an unforgiving and scientifically correct universe, full of chaos paradoxically standardized by algorithms.
Cleverly, it's these extraneous planets we see mirrored in Robin and his father - preferring to live in isolation, indifferent and unconnected in their ecosystem surrounded by potential, yet rejected, allies. A stunning read you'll be thinking about months after finishing.

Firstly I’d like to thank Cornerstone for my advanced copy of Bewilderment, which will be released on 21st September.

With a spot on the Booker Prize longlist and rights to a film adaptation sold before the book has even been released, Bewilderment’s success seems to be written in the stars. Richard Powers is an incredibly celebrated novelist, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and Stanford professor. Bewilderment is his first novel since The Overstory won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2019.

While I’m unsure Powers needs the £50k Booker Prize money, I can see Bewilderment being shortlisted, and perhaps winning. When the longlist was announced, I was particularly interested in this book. It seemed to promise the vivid sense of place that comes with an ecological narrative, while integrating science and science fiction as core themes in the story. While it certainly accomplishes these things, I unfortunately found that the story didn’t entirely work for me.

At the core of Bewilderment is the relationship between astrobiologist Theo and his young son Robin. Over the course of the novel, Theo tries to balance the pressures of a successful academic career with raising a child alone since the untimely loss of his wife Alyssa (of course a far more interesting character than he). Robin, coming to terms with grief himself, is a very emotionally complex character, feeling things deeply and unpredictably. After a violent incident between Robin and a classmate, alongside an influx of what his school perceives as behavioural issues, Theo is encouraged to medicate or find therapy for his son. Eventually, Theo allows a friend of his deceased wife’s to use Robin in an experimental therapy trial.

Robin’s behaviour slowly begins to change, embodied in his approach to ecology. At first he is devastated and unable to reckon with his own emotions, but eventually he becomes a promising young activist, particularly palatable to the online masses. The strength of the story definitely lies in the dialogue. Robin’s dialogue specifically is formatted in an unusual way, italicised rather than in quotation marks, which I actually really liked; it felt emphasised, mirroring the way a child’s speech naturally lilts.

Early in the novel, the two listen to an audiobook of a classic sci-fi story. I won’t mention which, since it feels like a spoiler, though from the themes of experimental treatment in Bewilderment it may be an easy guess. From there, the story follows an entirely predictable trajectory, mirroring this novel pretty clearly, right to the unnecessarily bitter end. For me, Bewilderment didn’t feel original or experimental in the way a celebrated and prize-winning novel should, rather, it rehashes a storyline from the 1950s that I’m uncertain is still necessary in the same form in our contemporary world. I particularly find issue with the way Robin is presented as a loveable and ‘better’ child once he is ‘cured’ of his behavioural concerns; I’m unconvinced this is accomplished in an entirely compassionate way on Powers’ behalf.

Alongside meditations on the climate crisis and animal extinction, the story also follows parallel storylines of funding in the sciences, the pathetic plights of academia in the face of global crisis, and the ethics of raising a child when the world is so fragile, all in under 300 pages, with a writing style that is discreet and slow. The result is a confused and overcrowded story that I don’t think entirely worked.

Something I found deeply annoying was that Powers chose to set the story in our recognisable world, but would change very random details. At one point, Robin becomes obsessed with a young girl who goes viral online – a Scandinavian environmental activist with autism who wears her hair in plaits. While this is blatantly Greta Thunberg, Powers’ changes her name to Inga Alder, for no reason. Similarly, TEDTalks are changed to CODTalks (why????). These very random and baseless decisions detached me from the world of the story entirely.

Overall, while I can see why people love this story, I found it to be a bit shapeless, and that it didn’t really achieve the grandeur I felt it promised.

⭐⭐⭐

Bewildered is a fair description of how I am feeling having finished this book. I enjoyed the father-son relationship, the grief in losing the mother was well described and the climate change/frightening president added a current flavour to the tale. But I was lost by the astrobiology and the endless planets - I had to skim through these parts to get to the bits that hooked me.
So a book of two halves - I was all there for the human story but completely turned off by the astrobiology.

Richard Powers’ new novel is a retelling of Flowers Of Algernon for the early 21st century (and to be fair, Powers dies explicitly tip his hat to Daniel Keyes’ classic early on). It continues the ecological themes of The Overstory but adds a strong element of human drama as a widowed father struggles to cope with raising a son who comes with his own set of challenges, against a backdrop of the US (tbh, for all the protesting at doomed ecology that suffuses this book, the world outside North America might as well not exist) sliding into dystopian fascism. It’s a quick read, but a memorable one, with a central character that sticks in the mind.

'Bewilderment' was one of the top 3 books I wanted to read in 2021 and I was beyond thrilled to be approved to read an ARC thanks to NetGalley.

I was blown away by 'The Overstory' and had high hopes for Powers' latest. I was not disappointed. This is a remarkable novel. What stood out for me was the desperate sense of increasing panic regarding the state of the environment and the impact of climate change. It explores both the arrogance of humanity ironically while exploring its insignificance in the universe. This novel is timeous. While I was reading this the IPCC report on climate change was published. The impact of humanity on the environment is startling: with a 70% decline in the animal population in the last 50 years.

The writer explores these enormous issues through the close examination of the relationship between a father and his son. Theo is a young widowed father trying his best to look after his son, Robin, who struggles to conform to the school system. The exploration of the labelling of individuals and the need to medicate anyone who doesn't fit into what society decides is 'normal' is profound.

''I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet is on the spectrum. That is what a spectrum is. Iwanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there is a name for that, too.''

This is a novel that is incredibly well structured. Not a word is wasted. It is wise. It is urgent. I can't wait to read a hard copy so that I can highlight all the beautiful quotations.

I whole-heartedly recommend this novel.

Richard Powers latest offering is a more human, ambitious, profoundly moving, genre defying novel that echoes, consolidates and moves on from The Overstory, a blend of science, fact and fiction. At its core is the incredible bond and love between a widowed father, astrobiologist at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, Theo Byrne, and his bright, kind, if emotionally volatile, troubled 9 year old son, Robin. Both are grieving the loss of wife and mother, birdwatcher Alyssa 'Aly', passionate environmentalist and activist, who died in a accident, still looming large in their lives. It is set in a U.S. in a near dystopic future, mirroring contemporary realities, with a populist unnamed President emulating Trump, in a world teetering under a host of issues, such as climate change and animal extinction, cuts in scientific research budgets, with a civil war averted merely because of the bewilderment of the population.

Theo is struggling to raise his son, Robin faces being thrown out of school that wants him medicated into becoming a more manageable student, something that Theo is against, there have been multiple 'explanations' of Robin's 'condition', including being on the spectrum, Theo feels that psychoactive drugs are not the answer. He takes Robin camping, the two of them captivated by the possibilities of life beyond earth, imagining and speculating about what could be on other planets. Theo ventures towards an experimental approach for Robin to help stabilise him, overseen by a friend of Aly's, a technique of using real time neural imaging and AI mediated feedback to help Robin manage his emotions and thought processes by replicating the more desired qualities of his mother, using her as a model template for behavioural training. This really helps Robin, he becomes an activist, campaigning and lobbying for what really matters.

I really felt for Theo when it came to responding to the innocent and idealistic Robin's bafflement at humanity's insanity and self destructiveness when it comes to the environment and the multitude of life that comprise our complex eco-systems, allowing the planet to reach such a crisis point. There is little in the way of answers to the eco-challenges we face on earth, this is a heartbreaking and despairing read in so many ways, but what shines in this novel is the depth and intimacy of Theo and Robin's father-son relationship, the nature of human consciousness, and the importance of all life on earth. I hope many readers do not get put off by the science in this book, because this is both thought provoking and inspiring, and I loved it. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. I thought I would enjoy it much more.. Robin is a very different child, enormously intelligent with empathy for all beings and Theo his father desperate to protect him.
Very bittersweet.
I can understand why people will love this book but I couldn't quite click with it. Robin is a wonderful character, too old for his years. The experimental treatment I had major problems with too.
Well written and highly emotional

Beautiful book - the story seems small but it touches so many big themes: from grieve and dealing with loss, to politics and climate change and the special relationship between father and son.

Richard Power’s ‘The Overstory’ is one of my favourite novels. Telling the story of a forest through many protagonists trying to save it made me look at nature and trees completely differently. I will never pass a great specimen without offering up a silent prayer of thanks and gratitude. I was hoping that ‘Bewilderment’ might do the same for astrobiology but although I learned a lot about the subject, there was, for this reader anyway, too much information. The central story of a bereaved father and his son is very touching but the central tenet, reaching the afterlife through AI, was not totally convincing. Nevertheless, if this sounds like a harsh review it should be noted that I remain in awe of Powers- his erudition, writing and bravery to tackle new subjects.
Thank you NG for the opportunity to read this advance copy.

There’s a definite case to be made for Richard Powers to be one of the best novelists living and working today. Certainly, he’s often one of the most interesting. His novels cover an impressively wide array of subjects — from ecology to music to art to science — and he usually has something significant to say about all of them. His 2018 novel The Overstory, for example, is a remarkable work of eco-fiction and wholly deserved to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year.

And yet, as I read the description for Bewilderment, I have to admit to feeling a little wary — largely because it sounded a little close to Operation Wandering Soul, Powers’s rather mawkish and by his own admission least successful novel. But I needn’t have worried. It’s not as sentimental as Soul (although it teeters pretty close to it at times) and is as a whole a much better book.

That said, it does at times feel rather more scrappy than Powers’s best work. There’s almost a ‘greatest hits’ vibe to it at times, with significant similarities to not only Soul but the philosophical musings on neuroscience in The Echo-Maker and Galatea 2.2 and the eco-concerns of Overstory. This, in itself, is no bad thing and every writer of course has themes that they return to over and over. And yet, it seems rather overt here. The neuroscience researcher Currier, for example, seems at time rather too similar to his AI-researching counterpart Lentz in Galatea 2.2.

Another slight misgiving is that it feels a little frantic in its desire for currency. It’s clearly highly influenced by the activism of Greta Thunberg (who has a clear fictional analogue in the novel), not to mention an unnamed but decidedly Trump-like present who Powers, depressingly, gives a second term. But then maybe there is a need for urgency here — not only with an ongoing and dramatically worsening climate crisis but a political climate (and just in the US but also here in the UK) of growing anti-scientism and post-truth machination. It just feels that, unlike Galatea and Overstory, these elements have been written with more passion than care and will ultimately age the novel.

The novel centres around widowed astrophysicist Theo Byrne and his attempts to get his troubled son Robbie through the grieving process. (It’s far from being just about this, of course, but this is the surface layer from which Powers delves deeply into science, climate, politics and so on.) It’s established early on that Robbie is autistic and Powers’s representation of the condition did tend to worry me slightly. It’s possible that this is from a personal over-reaction on my part (having been recently diagnosed with ASD myself) but it just seemed that Powers leaned just a bit too closely into the trope as those with autism being otherworldly and unknowably alien savants. It’s something that I feel can be rather counterproductive and it’s made even more overt here with Theo’s flights of imagination to other planets — one of the key ways he continues to relate to Robbie.

However, with these things said, this is still a novel absolutely stuffed with great ideas, expressed with considerable skill and style. I’ve found, particularly with the move to using an ebook reader, that one superficial metric for judging a book’s merit is the number of bookmarks you put in it and I bookmarked a lot in Bewilderment. And it wasn’t just the ruminations on art, politics and science. Powers adds a rather nice layer of SF speculation to the novel, with direct allusions to a number of science-fiction writers, most notably Asimov, Daniel Keyes and Olaf Stapledon.

But it’s not just a novel of ideas. If Powers can sometimes be a little too mawkish for his own good, he can, with a little discipline, very effectively tug at the heartstrings too. I was engaged enough in the father/son relationship at the heart of the book to definitely want to keep reading, despite a growing fear that I was going to receive an emotional punch to the face, much in the style of the ending of Galatea 2.2. It’s with decidedly mixed feelings that I can say I wasn’t disappointed.

Bewilderment is far from being Powers’s best work but it’s also far from being his worst either. It’s an extremely well-written, timely and characteristically smart discussion of a number of topics that really do need to be discussed and it does so in a way that is not only intellectually engaging but emotionally too.

Perhaps Richard Powers' most readable novel to date, Bewilderment draws broadly convincing parallels between the unknowability of humans and the unmappable reaches of the cosmos. It's a quick and involving read, most convincing when dealing with space and technology, marginally less so when focusing on parenthood. But a smart and engaging novel overall, and plenty of food for thought.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Heinemann for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thought it would be hard to follow The Overstory (which I LOVED) but I see that whereas The Overstory was an eco novel that branched out into the expanse, Bewilderment focuses in on the individual looking upwards at that canopy.
I think Powers is an incredible writer and I was thrilled to get this eproof. I read it over the weekend and it flew by. It was quite intense at times with just the two main characters but Powers so it's a good job Powers is so skilled at writing them!
The novel felt timely and as if it could have been written quite quickly compared to The Overstory which was so layered.
I also loved his prose and how he conjures themes of multiplicities or parallel existences out of the everyday.
I still feel down due to the ending :( and would love to know more about why he chose that. I felt that there could have been a bit more hope, or even something that pushed the sci fi themes to the next level.

Hard to admit when you're working in the bizz of books for 10+ years and haven't read a single word by Richard Powers up to now.

So glad I finally did. This book tells a story which seems simple on the surface but it contains everything: life and death. Young and old. Nature and politics. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. What goes on in your head and every single galaxy out there.

Five stars. Easily!

I was very excited to read Richard Powers' latest book having loved his previous novel, 'The Overstory'. 'Bewilderment' shares many of the same concerns as 'The Overstory' - in particular the rapid destruction of our planet - but approaches these in a new and original way, and in a much more compact form.

'Bewilderment' is set in what appears to be the very near future, and is narrated by Theo, an astrobiologist engaged in a search for other Earth-like planets that might support life. Theo's wife Alyssa, an animal-rights campaigner, has died, leaving him to bring up their nine-year-old neurodivergent son, Robin alone. Robin shares his late mother's concern for the destruction of the natural world. At the start of the novel, Theo is resisting calls from Robin's school principal to give him psychoactive drugs; instead, Robin ends up receiving an innovative form of neural feedback treatment using brain patterns from Alyssa, with unforeseen consequences.

This is such an impressive novel, in so many ways. First and foremost, it is a beautiful story of a father-son relationship. Theo always wants the best for Robin but also feels inadequate as a parent compared to his memory of Alyssa, and this absence is at the very heart of the novel. Theo and Robin's conversations are sweet and often very entertaining but also profound. The tenderness of this relationship contrasts with so much of the darkness surrounding it. Robin becomes an increasingly prophetic figure, offering a radical, almost messianic zeal in response to the apathy and wanton destruction of the planet he sees around him. In his innocence, candour and fervour, he resembles Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, and increasingly, rather than wondering why Robin isn't more like us, the novel compels us to ask why we aren't more like Robin.

The novel is also a great piece of science writing - Powers manages to write about ecology, neurology and space exploration entirely convincingly, including very plausible descriptions of developments in these fields that haven't actually happened yet, which allows him to pose some weighty and thought-provoking ethical questions. As well as this, there is a real sense of urgency throughout the novel, which occupies somewhere between the present and the apocalyptic - the world Powers describes still feels recognisable, but is significantly closer to environmental and political collapse, a world in which, "against shamelessness, outrage was impotent.". In this way, Powers suggests that apocalypse may not be as far away as we like to imagine, and the novel burns with righteous anger at the greed and cynicism which is bringing us to this stage.

This will surely be one of the strongest contenders for this year's Booker Prize, and should be recognised as a classic work of ecofiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.