The New Republic - Gish Jen
"An unabashed tearjerker....The most moving and inspiring of all Powers’s books."
The Brooklyn Rail - John Domini
"In Bewilderment, [Powers's] mastery strikes a new vein.…it raises goosebumps and breaks our hearts."
Oprah Winfrey
"Richard Powers is one of our country’s greatest living writers. He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. I’m in awe of his talent."
Associated Press - Rob Merrill
"[A]stounding.…a must-read novel.…It’s urgent and profound and takes readers on a unique journey that will leave them questioning what we’re doing to the only planet we have."
Tracy K. Smith
"Extraordinary.…Powers’s insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination and more vigorously toward the urgencies of the real and familiar stakes rattling our persons and our planet."
Boston Globe - Alexander C. Kafka
"One of America’s most ambitious and imaginative novelists.... In a year of unprecedented worldwide drought, fire, and flooding, [Bewilderment] couldn’t be timelier.... Whether concerning family or nature, this heart-rending tale warns us to take nothing for granted."
Ron Charles
"[P]oignant…Bewilderment is a cri de coeur.…this is a hauntingly intimate story set within the privacy of one family trapped in the penumbra of mourning."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Ellen Atkins
"The tenderness between father and son seem[s] so real and heartfelt that the novel becomes its own empathy machine. What’s more powerful, though, is how the emotions Bewilderment evokes expand far beyond the bond of father and son to embrace the living world."
Air Mail - David Yaffe
"Powers [has] an emotional core to everything he writes, and this sets him apart from nearly everyone."
Seattle Times - David Laskin
"Bewilderment is a big book about what matters most.…a brilliant, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking book."
The Economist
"Powers succeeds in engaging both head and heart. And through its central story of bereavement, this novel of parenting and the environment becomes a multifaceted exploration of mortality."
Bethanne Patrick
"Achingly current and wise."
Los Angeles Times - Carolyn Kellogg
"Intimate.…Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change."
The Guardian - Rob Doyle
"Remarkable.... Bewilderment channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac."
The Ezra Klein Show - Ezra Klein
"You could think of it as ‘The Innerstory’: It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit.... It is enchanting, and it is devastating."
New York Times - Alexandra Alter
"[Powers] wants to challenge our innate anthropocentrism, both in literature and how we live."
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Dale Singer
"As in The Overstory, Powers seamlessly yet indelibly melds science and humanity, hope and despair."
Newsweek
"Nothing short of transportive."
The New Yorker
"A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of ‘invisible suffering on unimaginable scales."
NPR - Heller McAlpin
"A heartrending tale of loss.…Powers continues to raise bold questions about the state of our world and the cumulative effects of our mistakes."
Nautilus - Caleb Scharf
"Immersive and astonishing.…Powers captures the tragedy of a species that could, but perhaps won’t, become a lasting part of a cosmic menagerie. But in this absorbing and effortlessly readable tale he seems to have also found uplifting poetry in our despair."
The New Yorker
"A moving depiction of filial love, as father and son confront a world of ‘invisible suffering on unimaginable scales."
