"An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers-each summoned in different ways by trees-are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? Listen. There's something you need to hear." --Provided by publisher.
Review Quotes:
This book is beyond special.... It's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.--Bill McKibben
An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.--citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
A towering achievement by a major writer.--Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
Should be mandatory reading the world over.--Emilia Clarke
The best book I've read in 10 years. It's a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it's a lodestone. It's a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet.--Emma Thompson
This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.... Remarkable.--Ron Charles "The Washington Post"
Monumental... The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.... A gigantic fable of genuine truths.--Barbara Kingsolver "The New York Times Book Review"
It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.... It changed how I see things and that's always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.--Barack Obama
The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.--Ann Patchett
The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers's The Overstory does this. Haunting.--Geraldine Brooks
I've read a lot of good books, but the last truly great book I read was The Overstory, by Richard Powers.--Ed Helms "New York Times Book Review"
Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub Date: April 02, 2019
1.1" H x 8.1" L x 5.4" W
512 pages
paperback