Orfeo: From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT

by RichardPowers (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2014

  $3.47

  LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014
  LONGLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2014
  LONGLISTED FOR THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015

  Seventy-year old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police outside. His DIY microbiology lab - the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear's ability to hear - has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els flees and turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him and for the alarm surrounding his activities to blow over.

  But alarm turns to national hysteria, as the government promises a panicked nation that the 'Bioterrorist Bach' will be found and brought to trial. As Els feels the noose around him tighten, he embarks on a cross-country trip to visit, one last time, the people in his past who have most shaped his failed musical journey. And through the help of these people - his ex-wife, his daughter, and his longtime artistic collaborator - Els comes up with a plan to turn this disastrous collision with national security into one last, resonant, calamitous artwork that might reach an audience beyond his wildest dreams.

  Acclaim for Richard Powers:

  'Nothing less than brilliant' -- John Updike
  
  'If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big.' -- Margaret Atwood

  'Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today... Sentence after sentence has the razor-sharp quality of aphorism about the weird wired world we have made' --Daily Telegraph

  'There is no other contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers' -- Guardian