When Russell Stone becomes the teacher of a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence, he is both entranced and troubled. How can this refugee from terror radiate such bliss? Is it possible to be so open and alive without coming to serious harm? Thassa's joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research has enabled him to announce his discovery of the genetic underpinnings of happiness. Thassa's congenital optimism is severely tested by the growing media circus. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the world at large.
Read an extract from the book on the New York Times website
John Crace's Digested Read -- The Guardian
Reviews
The Scotsman
Stuart Kelly
"The almost arch, self-conscious style is not an affectation; rather it allows Powers to move, cunningly, the authorial focus and suggest parallels between the novelist, the characters and the themes… Generosity is not just an intelligent embodiment of ideas, or a fun, sassy read. It's the kind of novel that breaks the novel to rebuild it for our times."
27/01/2010
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The Sunday Times
Stephen Amidon
"His acuity and satire are as sharp as ever, allowing him to deconstruct brilliantly the commercially charged world of genome mapping… What really makes Generosity tick, however, are its characters, who are as multifaceted and alive as any Powers has ever created."
27/01/2010
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
"Although you might expect a novel so weighted with medical and philosophical arguments to flatten its characters into brittle stereotypes, ultimately that's the most impressive aspect of this meditation on happiness and humanness. As "Generosity" drives toward its surprising conclusion, these characters grow more complex and poignant, increasingly baffled by the challenge and the opportunity of remaking ourselves to our heart's content."
27/01/2010
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The New York Times
Jay McInerney
""Generosity" is an excellent introduction to Powers’s work, a lighter, leaner treatment of his favorite themes and techniques... An excessively happy central character would seem like a potential handicap in a novel, but Powers manages the difficult feat of making Thassa plausible and even fascinating"
27/01/2010
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The Observer
Tim Adams
"Compulsive… In parts of his book, Powers himself seems swept away on Thassa's hopeful tide, enthralled by the possibility of human perfectibility; in the arguments between chemistry and mystery he finds it hard not to side with the former. Something always snags though, something in the structure of his fiction – or perhaps in his writer's DNA – which makes such faith seem suspicious. For all his speculative science, his edgy thinking, his novel ends up dramatising, with newsworthy urgency, an age-old problem: why would anyone believe in happy endings?"
27/01/2010
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
"Powers is careful not to show the reader too much of Thassa doing her happiness thing directly. Even so, he doesn't altogether solve what might be termed the Amélie problem: that of creating a joyful, empathetic and whimsically creative yet non-annoying figure... while there's something impressive and admirable about his appetite for ideas and information, Generosity mostly comes across as a William Gibson novel in which the thriller plot has been replaced by wooden debate."
27/01/2010
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The New Yorker
James Wood
"Powers has for some time been writing fiction by dictation, with the help of speech-recognition software. Not enough help, alas: on the current evidence, he also needs bullshit-recognition software. The prose, dictated or otherwise, reads as if it had been written by an Orientalist Tom Wolfe."
27/01/2010
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