After winning the Pulitzer in 2019 for The Overstory, Richard Powers has put another feather in his cap with Bewilderment, which has already made the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist. You'll find a sample of our review for this novel below, along with a Beyond the Book article on the young climate change activists that inspired one of Powers' characters.
We also check in on our Book Club discussion of Joshua Henkin's novel Morningside Heights, a sensitive and hopeful exploration of Alzheimer's narrated through one family's experience with the devastating condition.
We also bring you an excerpt from Shugri Said Salh's memoir The Last Nomad and the latest book news, including information on all six titles on the 2021 Booker Prize shortlist.
Very best,
Davina
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Morningside Heights
by Joshua Henkin
From the Jacket
Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It's about the love between women and men and children and parents, about the things we give up in the face of adversity, about what endures when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.
From the Discussion
"I loved this gem of a book and its quiet poignance. We observe Pru and Spence navigating life’s milestones together, some more painful than others. Some of these challenges really resonated with me and I was glad to read Morningside Heights at this time in my life. The characters are so well-drawn and dialogue well-crafted, I felt like I was air-dropped into their home where I could silently participate in their daily lives. This was the first book I read by Joshua Henkin and will not be the last." - paulak
"I was somewhat hesitant to request this book because I didn’t want to read a depressing story. However, I was surprised by the manner in which Henkin approached his novel. This was so much better than I imagined and so much more interesting than I had hoped. It was a sad story but it was suffused with such compassion, growth, hope and complexity that I was entranced. The characters are so well developed and amazingly real that after finishing the book I still think about each of them and wonder what they are doing now." - gerrieb
"I liked the book. From the first page I was drawn to the character Pru. I loved the early days of the couple's relationship, it took me right back to college. Spence’s illness was very sad, and I came to understand more of what people with Alzheimer’s go through. This was a well-written book and I now want to read Joshua Henkin’s earlier work. A good book for book clubs to discuss." - Maggie
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Pantheon Books. Novel. 304 pages. Published June 15, 2021 |
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Bewilderment
by Richard Powers
In 2019, Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory, a sprawling novel whose characters are obsessed with protecting magnificent trees. Although his follow-up, Bewilderment, has just as much of an environmentalist conscience, its scope is more intimate. It focuses on the experiences of one family and is narrated as a first-person retrospective by Theo Byrne, an astronomy professor at a midwestern university who models earthlike planets in the search for extraterrestrial life. His wife, Alyssa, died in a car accident two years ago. Their volatile nine-year-old son, Robin, named after his mother's favorite bird, is on the autism spectrum and has been violent towards his father and schoolmates.
Powers is in full control of his myriad themes and packs a lot into 200-some pages. The plot leaps between spheres: between the public eye, where Robin is a scientific marvel and an environmental activist, and the privacy of family life; between an ailing Earth and the other planets Theo can study or imagine; and between the humdrum of daily existence and the magic of another state where Robin can reconnect with his late mother...
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Beyond the Book: Youth Environmental Action
In Richard Powers' Bewilderment, nine-year-old Robin Byrne is distressed at the plight of endangered species and commits to painting as many of them as he can, as well as undertaking one-kid protests outside the Wisconsin statehouse and in the nation's capital. He specifically emulates a character called "Inga Alder," who is clearly based on Greta Thunberg.
Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, has been in the public eye since 2018, when she encouraged students around the world to join her on school strikes, walking out of their classrooms on Fridays to draw attention to the urgency of the climate crisis. Millions participated. Since then, she has met with world leaders and made speeches before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations (UN). Her organization, Fridays for Future, is also supported by UNICEF.
Thunberg is not the first youth activist to be given an international platform. In 1992, Vancouver's Severn Cullis-Suzuki, then just 12 years old, gave a speech at the United Nations climate conference in Rio de Janeiro, earning the nickname "the girl who silenced the world for six minutes." ...
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BookBrowse features Read-Alikes, hand-picked recommendations of similar books, for each work we review.
Read-Alikes for Bewilderment include:
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W.W. Norton & Company. Novel. 288 pages. Published Sept 21, 2021
Critics' Consensus: 4.3/5, BookBrowse Rating: 5/5
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BookBrowse offers excerpts of almost every book we feature so you can read a little and decide if it's a good fit for you or your book club. Here is an excerpt from The Last Nomad, a memoir about nomadic life in Somalia by Shugri Said Salh. |
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PROLOGUE
I am the last nomad.
How can I be the last one? Nomads still exist in that faraway desert where I grew up, so how can I make such a bold statement? What I am really trying to say is, I am the last person in my direct line to have once lived like that, and now I feel like the sole keeper of my family's stories. As I sit here in my home in California, weaving my tale for you, the weight of that responsibility urges me on. All of my ancestors on both sides of my family were nomads; they traveled the East African desert in search of grazing land for their livestock, and the most precious resource of all—water. When they exhausted the land and the clouds disappeared from the horizon, their accumulated ancestral knowledge told them where to move next to find greener pastures. They loaded their huts and belongings onto their most obedient camels and herded their livestock to a new home.
My nomadic family was at the mercy of the weather. At the end of jilal, the long dry season, when the clouds finally rum-bled with rain, we looked up at the sky with renewed hope...
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The finalists for the prestigious UK literary award the Booker Prize were announced on September 14th. The books that made this year's shortlist are:
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Bewilderment by Richard Powers
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A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
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No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
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The Promise by Damon Galgut (Europa)
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The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
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Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
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With so many new books published every month, it's difficult to find the standouts, the ones which are really worth your time. This is why hundreds of thousands of readers rely on BookBrowse to do the hard work of sifting though the multitude of titles to find the most promising new books, with a focus on books that entertain, engage and enlighten. |
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BookBrowse Highlights is one of our four free newsletters. We also offer Publishing This Week every Sunday, and Book Club News and Librarian News monthly.
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