Richard Powers’s 2018 novel was nothing shy of a literary sensation: The sweeping,(W. W. Norton), Powers returns with a story that’s a bit more intimate; at its heart thumps the relationship between a father and a son who, having lost their wife and mother, are seeking to understand one another, and the earth, among the moss and rhododendron of the Smoky Mountains. Powers’s masterful observations of the beauties and sorrows that connect each and every living one of us, human or otherwise, pulse as strong as ever.