Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, Bewilderment is an important and beautiful book about empathy and the sadness and beauty which define living in our troubled world.
The book follows a father, Theo, and his son, Robin, as they struggle to fill the spaces the world has cut out for them. Set in the near future, or perhaps an adjacent timeline, the book moves seamlessly between realism and the speculative. Theo’s job searching for signs of life in the galaxy brings us to visit a variety of different worlds, and Robin, a sensitive boy who is quick to anger, begins an avant-garde treatment for his unspecific neuro-atypicality. The therapy teaches him to mimic brainwaves patterns in an effort to teach him how to regulate his emotions, and has some unexpected repercussions.
“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp…”
Always teasing a delicate line between despair and hope, shrinking and expanding between the relationship of father and son, and the nature of being in the universe, the book is rich with love and life and the implausible abundance of the natural world. It is the best kind of speculative fiction: Wild and exciting and new, while full of old wisdom.
If you like personal stories with heart that invite you to think about how you live in the world, you should definitely add it to your reading list.
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Buy on kindle £9.99
Hardback from Waterstones £9.49
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