Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of BEWILDERMENT

Description

In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers' brilliant and compelling novel. As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and provide the reader with a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.

Richard Powers has been a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as winner of the US National Book Award 2006 and a three-times finalist for the US National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the author of eight novels, including The Echo Maker, In the Time of Our Singing and Galatea 2.2. He lives in Illinois.

An outstanding novel * Observer * A first novel of intricate merit... A rich imagination glitters throughout * Mail on Sunday * Unexpected and richly imaginative... Full of intellectual descriptions and stylistic diversions * London Review of Books * If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century he'd probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big. -- Margaret Atwood A writer of blistering intellect... [Powers is] a novelist of ideas and a novelist of witness, and in both respects, he has few American peers * Los Angeles Times *