Bewilderment

After the death of Theo's wife, an environmental activist, the boy's escalating distress leads them to an experimental neurofeedback therapy that trains Robin on recordings of his late mother's brain - a quietly speculative premise Richard Powers uses to devastating emotional effect.

Following his Pulitzer-winning The Overstory, Bewilderment is a smaller, more intimate book, but no less impassioned about ecological catastrophe and the wonder of the living world. Father and son's bedtime voyages to imagined exoplanets become the novel's tender heart and its widening lens on cosmic solitude. Powers writes with lyrical intensity, and if the political backdrop is drawn in broad strokes, the central relationship is rendered with piercing love.