Where to start with Richard Powers

American novelist, born 1957. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2006 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019.

Best Richard Powers book to start with: The Echo Maker (2006), on 2 of the 13 lists it could have made.

Begin with The Overstory, where Powers is at full stretch. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. It is a novel about trees and the people who come to love them, and its first section is a set of separate stories, which can feel slow until the book draws the characters together.

Bewilderment is shorter. Shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, it follows an astrobiologist and his troubled young son, and it is the easiest of his books to finish in a weekend. The Echo Maker won the National Book Award in 2006: a man wakes after a car accident convinced that his sister has been replaced by an impostor, and the book follows the investigation. It is gripping and clever.

Operation Wandering Soul, shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1993, is the hardest. It follows a young doctor in a children’s ward in Los Angeles, and it is dense and sorrowful. Leave it until you know whether you like Powers at his most demanding.