Plowing the Dark: A Novel

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powerss Plowing the Dark recasts the rules of the novel and remains one his most daring works--a mesmerizing fiction explores the imaginations power to both destroy and save. In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound a band of virtual-reality researchers races to complete the Cavern an empty white room that can become a jungle a painting or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city an American is held hostage chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join these two remote places? Only the shared imagination a room that these people unwittingly build in common where they are all about to meet.. Adie Klarpol a skilled but disillusioned artist comes back to life revived by the thrill of working with cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. On the other side of the globe Taimur Martin an English teacher recovering from a failed love affair is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. . Mention Richard Powers name to other writers and see them get that faraway look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence.―Sven Birkerts Esquire