Richard Powers Books in Order

August Sander's photograph of three young men in 1914 becomes the center of three linked stories. Powers follows the farmers, a modern narrator, and a computer writer into a mystery shaped by art and war.

Eddie Hobson Sr., a sick and stubborn family man, hides the truth about his failing body while building a private project called Hobbstown. His children try to understand the illness, the history, and the secrets.

Stuart Ressler enters 1950s molecular biology hoping to crack the genetic code, then vanishes from science. Twenty-five years later, another pair follows his trail through love, Bach, computers, and the puzzle of meaning.

In a Los Angeles children's ward, surgical resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera care for children pushed to the edge. Their work becomes a grim, tender look at illness, imagination, and the stories children need.

A fictional Richard Powers returns to a research campus and joins neurologist Philip Lentz in training a neural network on literature. As the machine learns, the experiment unsettles ideas about reading, consciousness, and love.

Laura Body, a divorced real-estate agent in Lacewood, Illinois, receives a cancer diagnosis just as a nearby consumer-products giant reveals its long history. The novel links one body to the hidden costs of business.

At a Puget Sound lab, artists and programmers build an immersive virtual world. In Beirut, an American hostage survives an empty room with memory alone, and the two stories test imagination as refuge and trap.

After meeting at Marian Anderson's 1939 concert, scientist David Strom and singer Delia Daley build a family around music. Their children come of age in a divided America, caught between art, race, loyalty, and history.

A truck crash leaves Mark Schluter with a brain injury and the conviction that his sister Karin is an impostor. As a neurologist investigates, family history, memory, and the Nebraska landscape turn strange and unstable.

Creative writing teacher Russell Stone meets Thassa Amzwar, an Algerian refugee with an uncanny gift for happiness. As scientists and media close in, her joy becomes a question of genetics, ownership, and exploitation.

Composer Peter Els keeps a home microbiology lab in his search for hidden patterns in music. When Homeland Security mistakes the experiment for a threat, he goes on the run through the people and sounds that shaped him.

Nine people are drawn by their encounters with trees into a larger story of forests, activism, and loss. As their lives branch together, the novel asks what humans owe the living world around them.

Astrobiologist Theo Byrne studies distant worlds while raising his troubled nine-year-old son, Robin, after his wife's death. A new neurofeedback treatment offers hope, but their bond is tested by grief and a damaged planet.

On the Pacific island of Makatea, old friends, artists, divers, and an AI pioneer converge as residents weigh a plan for floating cities. The novel links ocean wonder to memory, technology, and the future of home.