Orfeo
  • Published: 30 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804951767
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99

Orfeo

  • Richard Powers
Formats & editions
Paperback
30 Sep 2025
EBook
12 Jun 2025
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From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Overstory and Bewilderment

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014

'A virtuoso performance' SUNDAY TIMES

'Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful' INDEPENDENT

'A magnificent and moving novel' LOS ANGELES TIMES

Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab - where he is conducting the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find musical patterns in surprising places - has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security.

Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive, earning him the moniker 'Bioterrorist Bach'. He hatches a daring plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.

A gripping escape narrative filled with lyrical wonder, Orfeo is both a portrait of a creative, obsessive man, and a reflection on finding melodies in everyday life.
  • Published: 30 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804951767
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Praise for Orfeo

Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful

Independent on Sunday

Powers is prodigiously talented. besides being fearfully erudite, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life

New York Times

A virtuoso performance

Sunday Times

A magnificent and moving novel

Los Angeles Times

The best novel about classical music ... since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Independent

Orfeo has a galloping finale that is sweet, funny, sad and haunting all at once ... A formidably intelligent, ecstatically noisy novel

Guardian

Extraordinary ... His evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page ... Once again, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our finest novelists

Newsday
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