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The Lathe Of Heaven

On sale

21st October 2021

Price: £9.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781473234178

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‘Ursula Le Guin was able to reimagine many concepts we take to be natural, shared, and unalterable – gender, utopia, creation, war, family, the city, the country – and reveal the all-too-human constructions at their centre … Literature will miss her. There’s no one like her’ Zadie Smith

‘Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power’ OBSERVER

Through his dreams, George Orr can make alternate realities real – but who is controlling him?

War rages and global warming wreaks havoc on the quality of life everywhere as seven billion people jostle for living space and food. For George Orr, a mild and unremarkable man, the world is overwhelmingly difficult. But George is different: his dreams can change reality – although he has no means of controlling this extraordinary power.

Psychiatrist Dr William Haber offers to help, directing George to dream a world without racism. But as ambition gets the better of ethics, no one can predict the devastating consequences.

Reviews

David Mitchell, author of CLOUD ATLAS
Ursula Le Guin is a chemist of the heart
Zadie Smith
Ursula Le Guin was able to reimagine many concepts we take to be natural, shared, and unalterable - gender, utopia, creation, war, family, the city, the country - and reveal the all-too-human constructions at their center ... Literature will miss her. There's no one like her
NEW YORK TIMES
A rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion
OBSERVER
Le Guin is a writer of phenomenal power
TLS
Le Guin is one of the singular speculative voices of our future, thanks to her knack for anticipating issues of seminal importance to society
GUARDIAN
She is unparalleled in creating fantasy peopled by finely drawn and complex characters
THE TIMES
Her worlds have a magic sheen . . . She moulds them into dimensions we can only just sense. She is unique. She is legend
Roddy Doyle
I'd love to sit at my desk one day and discover that I could think and write like Ursula Le Guin
EMPIRE
Le Guin's storytelling is sharp, magisterial, funny, thought-provoking and exciting, exhibiting all that science fiction can be
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
[Le Guin had] the heart of a poet who knew all too well the difference between miracle and eureka, revelation and revolution
DAILY TELEGRAPH
Le Guin writes tellingly of different kinds of society . . . and of the individual's response to them
Michael Chabon
When I read The Lathe of Heaven as a young man, my mind was boggled; now when I read it, more than twenty-five years later, it breaks my heart. Only a great work of literature can bridge - so thrillingly - that impossible span