Orfeo
Richard Powers
W. W. Norton & Company
<p><i>With pitch-perfect precision,&nbsp;<b>Richard Powers</b>&nbsp;tells the story of a musician journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present.&nbsp;&nbsp;He "may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing" (Los Angeles Time Book Review).</i></p><p>One evening, 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens his front door to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab - the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to discover musical patterns in DNA strands - has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els flees and turns fugitive. In response, the government promises a terrifying nation that the ‘Bioterrorist Bach’ will be found and brought to trial.<br></p><p><i>"Powers is apparently incapable of writing a flat sentence. A flight "shrieked"; cars "scythed up and down the state highway." Eyebrows are "aerobic." The questions he raises about biological and artistic culture are deeply intelligent, yet his characters in Orfeo are sympathetically human... [The] mastery of his subjects is so complete that you never smell the research...Bravo, Richard Powers, for hitting so many high notes with Orfeo and contributing to the fraction of books that really matter."</i>&nbsp; -&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>Heller McAlpin, NPR</b><br></p><p><b>Richard Powers</b><i>&nbsp;is the multi-award-winning American author of 13 novels, who has now been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;</i></p>