The Overstory

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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In The Overstory, Richard Powers has created a beautiful tribute to nature, connection, activism, and home, and I was captivated from the first page. In this interlocking story with multiple time periods and characters, we are reminded that there is still so much to learn about our world. Recommended By Leah C., Powells.com

New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
A New York Times Notable, Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018

“The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period.” Ann Patchett

National Book Award winner Richard Powers’s twelfth novel is a sweeping, impassioned work 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. 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.

“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

“A big, ambitious epic... Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity.” The Boston Globe

“The Overstory, a novel about trees and people who understand them, is the eco-epic of the year and perhaps the decade. Unlike the Lorax, who spoke for the trees, Richard Powers prefers to let them do their own talking.” Leanne Shapton, judge for the Man Booker Prize

“The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting.” Geraldine Brooks

“The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer.” Thomas McGuane

“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

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.