Book description
In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, virtual reality
researchers race to complete the Cavern, a bland white room that can
become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a
war-torn city on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, an American
is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room...
Adie Klarpol, a disillusioned artist, is invigorated by the thrill
of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. As Cold War
empires collapse and the Berlin Wall falls, she retreats into the
cyber-realities she has been hired to create. In Beirut, English
teacher Taimur Martin is held in solitary confinement by Islamic
fundamentalists, where he must keep his mind whole by the force of his
memory alone. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the
shared imagination, a room that these two people unwittingly build in
common, where the strands of this wildly inventive novel coalesce into one.
Richard Powers is a the author of ten novels, including
Galatea 2. 2
and
The Gold Bug Variations,
both of which were nominated for the US National Book Critics Circle
Award;
Gain,
and
Operation Wandering Soul,
which were nominated for the US National Book Award for Fiction; and
The Echo Maker
, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and was Pulitzer Prize
finalist.
