Plowing the Dark
Richard Powers
  • Published: 27 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804951804
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99

Plowing the Dark

Pre-order from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

A brand new edition of the kaleidoscopic novel from the author of The Overstory

'Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation' Colson Whitehead

On the west coast of America, virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, a plain white room that can become a jungle, a painting or a vast Byzantine cathedral. Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is fascinated by this cutting-edge technology.

In a war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American teacher - Taimur Martin - is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room.

What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in common...

'Spectacular... Riveting' New York Times
  • Published: 27 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781804951804
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Richard Powers

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

portrait photo of Richard Powers

Also by Richard Powers

Playground
The Overstory
Bewilderment
Galatea 2.2
The Gold Bug Variations
The Echo Maker
The Time of our Singing
See all

Praise for Plowing the Dark

Spectacular ... Powers loves placing brilliant characters inside a fluorescent incubator, then watching ideas hatch on the page ... Riveting

New York Times

Superb ... Powers' seventh and perhaps greatest novel ... one of the most astonishing feats I've ever seen in literature

Washington Post

Richard Powers is one of the few writers who has taken on the challenge of Thomas Pynchon, creating a complex, unsentimental and simultaneously deeply moving world

Red
penguin pop image
penguin pop image