Galatea 2.2

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory, a thrilling and timely novel of the human soul.

After years of living abroad, a young writer, Richard, returns to the United States to take up the position of Humanist-in-Residence at the Centre for the Study of Advanced Sciences.

There he encounters Philip Lentz, a brilliant and outspoken cognitive neurologist who involves him in an outlandish and irresistible experiment: to train a neural net of computers – Helen – to model the human brain through reading a canonical list of Great Books.

Through repeated tutorials, the machine grows gradually more worldly, until she demands to know her own age, sex, race and reason for existing…

Galatea 2.2 is a dazzling novel of ideas that explores why we make the choices we do.

‘An ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work… It soars and spins… The novel attains an aching, melancholy beauty’
New York Times