Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines even his own sense of being. Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident.

Richard Powers was the recipient of a 1999 Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author of eight novels, including Plowing the Dark, Gain, and Galatea 2.2. He lives in Urbana, Illinois.