Gain - by Richard Powers (Paperback)

About the Book

Three Boston merchant brothers coax from an Irish immigrant the secret of making fine soap, and set into motion a chain of events that spins a family-run cottage soap works into a multinational consumer-goods giant.

Book Synopsis

From Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Overstory, Richard Powers's Gain braids together two stories on very different scales.

In one, Laura Body, divorced mother of two and a real-estate agent in the small town of Lacewood, Illinois, plunges into a new existence when she learns that she has ovarian cancer. In the other, Clare & Company, a soap manufacturer begun by three brothers in nineteenth-century Boston, grows over the course of a century and a half into an international consumer products conglomerate based in Laura's hometown. Clare's stunning growth reflects the kaleidoscopic history of America; Laura Body's life is changed forever by Clare.

Gain's stunning conclusion reveals the countless invisible connections between the largest enterprises and the smallest lives.

Review Quotes

"Powers is a writer of blistering intellect." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[Gain] is erudite, penetrating and splendidly written." --Bruce Bawer, The New York Times Book Review

"Richard Powers has proven himself a visionary writer." --Greil Marcus, The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

"Gain only confirms that Powers is, in fact, a major American novelist." --Adam Kirsch, The New Republic

About the Author

RICHARD POWERS is the author of a dozen novels, including The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.