Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers
Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Plowing the Dark

Author: Richard Powers

Narrator: Michael Braun, Morgan Hallett

Unabridged: 18 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 06/21/2019


Synopsis

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this inventive novel to coalesce. Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. As her ex-husband lies dying and the outbreak of computerized war fills her with a sense of guilty complicity, Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, were she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong. On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. Without distraction or hope of release, he must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion. Plowing the Dark is fiction that explores the imagination's power to both destroy and save.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Judy

The next book in my challenge to read all the novels of Richard Powers this year was a challenge! He uses two parallel stories to investigate how we perceive and navigate reality, imagination, confinement, freedom and, as always, modern society. One of his stories is set on Puget Sound on the northw......more

Goodreads review by Rick

If you are interested in virtual reality and the rigors of prolonged captivity (of an isolated kidnap victim) this is the perfect book for you. If it's just one or the other this book will likely suffice. Powers is not my kind of writers, the book has litle humor in it, is ultimately predictable (or......more