New York Times Bestseller A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most “prodigiously talented” (The New York Times Book Review) novelists. 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 … 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.”
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A slow build to completely immersing you in a world you’ve looked at but never seen— the world of trees and forests. Unforgettable human characters—and you will never look at an aspen or oak in the same way again.
A tour de force literture at its best the characters are woven in and out of each other with trees the primal forest which can never truly be tamed our place of growth wonder and healing excellent writing and creativity
A fantastic novel about trees, a classic.
Richard Powers writes great book. Some I’ve enjoyed more than others but that is all about my preference and nothing about his skill.
He carries so much plot on top of a plethora of facts around trees in this book, and like a couple of his earlier books he has changed the way I’ve thought about something forever.
Trees as sentient creatures that are aliens among us, but we recognize them as nothing more than a resource for us to plunder.
It led me to believe that no one should be able to own a tree older than them, giving the tree the most basic right, to exist.
Thought provoking, extremely well written, characters are not what you expect.
One of the best books I’ve ever read, and it’s about trees and people. Reading it has been like making new friends and finding the kinds of inspiring connections that extend to the spiritual. As I read, I was reminded of people, places and meaningful experiences from my own past and present. I learned new things about nature and living (and dying) entities and their interconnectedness. I cannot speak too highly of this book.