From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Overstory
From one of America's greatest writers, a thrilling and beautiful novel about why we make the choices we do - and, ultimately, about what makes us human.
After many years of living abroad, a young writer returns to the United States to take up the position of Humanist-in-Residence at the Centre for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he encounters Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent on using computers to model the human brain. Lentz involves the writer in an outlandish and irresistible project- to train a neural net by reading a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the machine grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own age, sex, race, and reason for existing...
About the Author
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Industry Reviews
Extraordinary. Entertainment of a very high order... One of the best books of the year * GQ *
Dazzling... A cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling. A lively tour de force * New York Times *
Powers...can nail emotional complexities with precision, while using his characters to explore how emerging technologies might shape our lives * Daily Telegraph *
It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book... If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century, which writer would he be? He'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big -- Margaret Atwood * New York Review of Books *
An extraordinary and brilliant novel of ideas * Time Out *
