In my reviews, I’ve talked about a lot of good authors and a lot of good books. I’ve written about general fiction writers such as Cormac McCarthy and John Updike, and I’ve written about great genre-writers such as Orson Scott Card and Joe Hill. I’ve reviewed everything from Harry Potter to Everyman.

One writer that flew under my radar was Richard Powers. If you don’t know him, he’s written some low-key novels like Galatea 2.2 and Gold Bug Variations. Still haven’t heard of him, right? Probably not. But Powers has received some recognition with his novel The Echo Maker, a winner of the National Book Award and runner-up to McCarthy’s The Road for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

The Echo Maker speaks volumes of nature, identity, and our relationships to both. After Mark Schluter is in a near-fatal car accident, he’s hospitalized, and his sister, Karin, returns to her hometown as well as to a past lover. She watches over Mark like any normal caring sister would, but when Mark regains consciousness, he thinks his sister is an imposter. He recognizes she is his sister, but fails to connect any sort of emotional bond to her.

Instead of assuming something’s wrong with him, his mind reasons the only other logical conclusion: that this is a person made to look like his sister in some effort, maybe by the government, to trick him. She enlists the help of Gerald Weber, a famous cognitive neurologist known for some of his nonfiction books about true characters struggling  with various neurological diseases and disabilities. If you’ve ever heard or read Oliver Sacks, there’s an obvious parallel What follows is a dense, 450-plus page novel that could’ve been written in 300. That’s the biggest flaw with the novel. Powers stretches scenes out to Stephen King-like proportions, musing on subjects for countless pages that could be summed up in one.

Still though, it’s an enthralling read. Many parts, like the scenes through Mark’s eyes when he first comes to consciousness after the wreck, read like prose poetry. This is convenient because the narrative structure of the novel is poetry in itself.

When Mark is recovering in the hospital, a mysterious person leaves a note at his bedside that reads “I am No One/but Tonight on North Line Road/GOD led me to you/so You could Live/and bring back someone else.” The novel is divided into five sections, each one named after its correspondent line in this eerie poem. “I am No One” is obviously about identity lost, as Mark comes to consciousness and labels his sister as an imposter, “but Tonight on North Line Road” explains what really happened that night of Mark’s wreck, and so on.

The Echo Maker is, quite simply, the most powerful novel I’ve encountered in some time. It is the musings of a master talent in Richard Powers. It’s about identity lost and identity gained. It’s about the intricacies of the brain.

And, through all the themes and ideas that populate Powers’ work, he ties nature into it and poses an interesting question. Are we the more unfortunate of the Earth’s species for our higher intelligence? Are the peasized brains of the cranes, who have endured throughout generations and who are only “one stutter-step away from pterodactyls,” truly better off in bliss?