Richard Powers

“One of the Best Books of 2021” Sunday Times

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos. What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs? What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world? The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.

Richard Powers is the multi-award-winning American author of 13 novels, who has now been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize.

The Overstory, shortlisted in 2018, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers says he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and is currently delving into ‘what social media, deep learning, hidden algorithms, and surprisingly intelligent marine creatures have to do with one another.’

This is a truly rare opportunity for Toppings in Ely and we’re exceptionally grateful to Richard’s publishers for offering us the chance to hear first hand from an uniquely talented writer whose work is already becoming the stuff of legend.