A story of a vast, unknown and interconnected world above the one we know, Powers' Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece brings together nine strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, to save America's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2019
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018
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.
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.
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.
'It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book.' - Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781784708245
Number of pages: 640
Weight: 461 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 33 mm
A novel about the natural world - trees specifically - and our power as human beings to destroy it or redeem it. It reminds me that we are all connected and that there is still time to make things right - TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage
An extraordinary novel... It's an astonishing performance... The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference - Guardian
Should be mandatory reading the world over - EMILIA CLARKE
On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision. You will learn new facts about trees... [An] exhilarating read - The Times
One of the most thoughtful and involving novels I've read for years... Extraordinary - Daily Telegraph
Absolutely blown away by this epic, heartbreaking novel about us and trees - EMMA DONOGHUE, author of Room and The Pull of the Stars
[A] majestic redwood of a novel... Combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees... It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope - Observer
A rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel... It will change the way you look at trees - Financial Times
Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.
[The Overstory is] the best book I’ve read in ten 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. We’ve got lots and lots of trees where we live in Scotland. If I’m feeling unwell or unsettled in any way, I always go and sit with a tree or walk through the trees, and that’s incredibly healing and helpful - Emma Thompson, New York Times
This is a book about trees, and it is a book about people, and perhaps most of all it is a book about the space between the two, and therefore about the passing of time. Recalling the science fiction he read as a... More
This is the most ambitious and complex book on the Booker longlist, and two thirds of the way through it, I was pretty sure it was heading for five stars and being one of the best books I have read this year. Sadly, I... More
I have dragged out the completion of this book for as long as possible, not wanting it to end. I knew from the first few magical chapters that this novel would speak to me on a level rarely reached and I was right. I... More
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