In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a bland white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room... Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is invigorated by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. As Cold War empires collapse and the Berlin Wall falls, she retreats into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. In Beirut, English teacher Taimur Martin is held in solitary confinement by Islamic fundamentalists, where he must keep his mind whole by the force of his memory alone. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common, where the strands of this wildly inventive novel coalesce into one.

Plowing the Dark

Literature & Fiction

RICHARD POWERS

Contemporary

Vintage

Jonah, Joseph and Ruth are the children of mixed-race parents determined to protect them from the grinding effects of race. Hothouse children, they are all musically talented, but they cannot be protected from the world for long. Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, but the world of opera can only accept him as a 'brilliant Negro singer'; Joseph, our narrator, becomes a pianist and devotes his talents to the service of his brother's; Ruth turns her back on classical music ('white music') and disappears, on the run with her black husband under suspicion of being a Black Panther.

Time of Our Singing

Vintage Books

Echo Maker

Vintage Books USA

On a winter night on a remote road in Nebraska, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter's truck turns over in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, his only close relative, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman - who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister - is really an identical impostor.   Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognise her, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, famous for his case studies describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. Weber recognises Mark as a very unusual case of Capgras syndrome and is keen to investigate. But what he discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self.   Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.  Set against the spectacular spring migrations of American Sandhill cranes, The Echo Maker is a profound and riveting novel that explores how memory, instinct and relationships make us who we are.

The Echo Maker

After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2―Richard Powers―returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.

Galatea 2.2

United States

Picador

The Gold Bug Variations

ABACUS +

First Harperprennial edition - 1996. Clean unmarked copy. Mild shelf and edge wear from normal handling. Gently used. No crease to spine. Lightly foxed. Satisfaction guaranteed!

The fictional protagonist, Richard Powers, becomes involved with Philip Lentz and his scheme to train a neural net on a canonical list of great books until the machine is capable of passing an English literature exam. As the device grows, Powers is forced to reconsider his literary vocation.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Abacus Uk

Literary

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The Time of Our Singing

POWERS, RICHARD

Heinemann/ William Heinemann/ Random House Group Limited

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Books by RICHARD POWERS