The Great Gatsby remains not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth...a gilded society intoxicated by wealth, dancing its way into the Great Depression.

Gatsby is a connoisseur's guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age, but it's also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story... A haunting meditation on aspiration, disillusionment, romantic love - and a blistering exposé of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America's true "business": "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"

It is a marvellously suggestive novel...a parable of modern America, and by extension of modern life

The first and greatest modern novel, it has beautiful women, lavish parties, romance, betrayal and murder woven together in an intricately structured plot. A prescient comment on the dying days of a gilded age that is brilliant entertainment with a very eloquent insight

His masterpiece, an elegy for the American Dream, the greatest lost cause of them all

His glorious prose captures ephemeral glamour magically

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings

Read it again, forever

Powers is . . . a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Extraordinary . . . Powers's insightful, often poetic prose draws us at once more deeply toward the infinitude of the imagination

Remarkable . . . channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors

Mingling ideas about neurodivergence, astrobiology, political radicalisation and environmental collapse... There is no question that Powers is a novelist of considerable, well, powers.... Bewilderment is both touching and finely written

Reading a Powers novel is like boarding a tour bus when you have a single day to explore an unfamiliar city. Bewilderment, his Booker-longlisted new novel, is a hop-on, hop-off trip around astrobiology, climate breakdown and neuro-feedback therapy... it is impossible to deny the importance of Powers's message

Powers is a former computer programmer whose ideas-rich fiction grounds the grandest scientific concepts in everyday experience. For him, environmental crisis means that we must share the pain not just of fellow-humans but other life-forms threatened by our botched stewardship of Earth.... Powers's unchained imagination stretches its empathy circle from lichen to nebulae, in finely crafted prose

Refreshing, original and moving

Powers has the rare gift of being able to deal with big ideas while keeping you interested in the lives and emotions of his characters

A heartfelt cry for climate awareness, with fantastical digressions to other planets and a rueful celebration of our own

It's a wonderful story - taut, touching and wholehearted

Intense and disturbing

A beautiful and thoughtfully written novel

Impressively precise in its scientific conjectures, Bewilderment is no less rich or wise in its emotionality.... channels both the cosmic sublime and that of the vast American outdoors, resting confidently in a lineage with Thoreau and Whitman, Dillard and Kerouac... Sorrowing awe is Bewilderment's primary tone, and its many remarkable scenes are controlled with high novelistic intelligence.

It's deftly crafted, packs an emotional punch, and Powers's urgent environmental message, delivered by the Greta Thunberg-like Robin, comes through loud and clear

Powers is extremely good at creating a very specific emotion in the reader: a potent mix of sadness and guilt. He's also a wizard when it comes to telling us about trees, rivers, insects and birds

Bewilderment is a compelling story about love in a dying world

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

It is a thoughtful exploration of individual grief, a study in empathy for the biosphere, a questioning of the medical profession's pathologising of children and a beginner's guide to eco-biology... Bewilderment is both cerebral and heartfelt, a rigorous and damning assessment of the state of the world today. A call to arms for empathy and action

Utterly absorbing

One of our most lavishly gifted writers

Nothing less than brilliant

It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book

With its first few pages, Powers' novel completely captivated us and with its last, it bowled us over. Powers creates a texture and specificity to our future that feels simultaneously sweepingly large and breathtakingly intimate, told through the most relatable point of view: the ferocious love of a parent for his child and his struggle to provide him a better tomorrow.

On The Overstory: It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it . . . It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.

On The Overstory: Really, just one of the best novels, period

On The Overstory: Monumental . . . breath-taking . . . a gigantic fable of genuine truths

On The Overstory: Exhilarating . . . on almost every page you will find sentences that combine precision and vision

On The Overstory: The best book I've read in ten years. A remarkable piece of literature

On The Overstory: An extraordinary novel . . . an astonishing performance . . . he is incredibly good at turning science into poetry

The success of the story - and a success it is - comes not from the ingenious scientific speculations, nor the shrewd literary connections (on the "emotional telepathy" of a work of art, or Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon), but the human story between father and son, as Theo finds out 'how my brain learns to resemble what it loves

Richard Powers's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is both brutal and heartwarming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, quietly building to an inevitable and devastating close

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

In Bewilderment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist has crafted a story of great beauty and power