Bewilderment

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. An astrobiologist thinks of a creative way to help his rare and troubled son in Richard Powers’ deeply moving and brilliantly original novel.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos. What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs? What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world? The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.

Shortlisted: The 2021 Booker Prize
Published by: Hutchinson Heinemann
Publication date: 21 September 2021

Richard Powers

About the Author

Richard Powers is the multi-award-winning American author of 13 novels, who has now been shortlisted twice for the Booker Prize.

More about Richard Powers

Video highlights

2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted author Richard Powers reads from ‘Bewilderment’.

Created in partnership with the BBC and Rural Media, ‘Bewilderment’ stars Luke Norris and is directed by Liam Young.

The astrobiology and neuroscience in Bewilderment – two fields undergoing rapid and dramatic revolutions – are really ways into much older and more intimate human passions

Richard Powers, Booker Prize Q&A, 2021

Listen to an extract from Bewilderment

Edoardo Ballerini brings Bewilderment to life in the audiobook.

Penguin Books UK · Bewilderment - Richard Powers, read by Edoardo Ballerini

Audiobook cover for Bewilderment on a blue-coloured background.

Powers is an essential member of the pantheon of writers who are using fiction to address climate change. Bewilderment shows how tenuous their hopes may be

Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times, September 16 2021

Richard Powers in a yellow shirt leaning against a wall.

Listen to Richard Powers on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week

Richard Powers discussed Bewilderment, climate anxiety and the next generation of climate change activists on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week the week after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

‘I do believe that we human beings are more susceptible to reflecting on and coming to terms with a changing world by hearing stories about people and by using that unique narrative power to imagine themselves into the lives of other people,’ he said.

Joining him in the discussion were Mya-Rose Craig, aka ‘birdgirl’, a young British-Bangladeshi ornithologist and activist, and journalist Simon Mundy.

Start the Week, BBC Radio 4

Exclusive: Powers on Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore

Richard Powers on Offshore

As part of a series for the Booker website, shortlisted writers choose a book from the Booker Library that has had a profound impact on them. Richard Powers reaches out of his comfort zone to pick up Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which, when he finally puts it down, leaves him ‘a different kind of reader’.

Explore the book

Cover of Bewilderment by Richard Powers on a blue background.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers - Reading Guide

The judges said Bewilderment was a ‘clarion call for us to wake up and realise what our minds might be truly capable of if we were less obedient to the status quo’. Delve into the book with our guide.