Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014

'A virtuoso performance' SUNDAY TIMES

'Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful' INDEPENDENT

'A magnificent and moving novel' LOS ANGELES TIMES

Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab - where he is conducting the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find musical patterns in surprising places - has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security.

Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive, earning him the moniker 'Bioterrorist Bach'. He hatches a daring plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.

A gripping escape narrative filled with lyrical wonder, Orfeo is both a portrait of a creative, obsessive man, and a reflection on finding melodies in everyday life.

Extraordinary and confounding, mind-spinning and wonderful * Independent on Sunday *
Powers is prodigiously talented. besides being fearfully erudite, he writes lyrical prose, has a seductive sense of wonder and is an acute observer of social life * New York Times *
A virtuoso performance * Sunday Times *
A magnificent and moving novel * Los Angeles Times *
The best novel about classical music ... since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus * Independent *
Orfeo has a galloping finale that is sweet, funny, sad and haunting all at once ... A formidably intelligent, ecstatically noisy novel * Guardian *
Extraordinary ... His evocations of music, let alone lost love, simply soar off the page ... Once again, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our finest novelists * Newsday *

Richard Powers has published fourteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.