A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

The first is a fictional story about the three young men in the picture during World War I. The novel explores the themes of cognitive construction of reality and the relationships between memory and emotional bonds between people and some of the tensions between the beneficial and exploitative aspects of a famous doctor's work. " But Deresiewicz also noted that his "is hardly the standard view of Powers's work.

His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.