The Overstory
ABOUT
THE BOOK
An exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.
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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.
About the Author
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
The Overstory is an epic, beautifully written novel that is of critical importance.
Boston Public Library, USA
An old-fashioned saga in which people from varying walks of life make surprising connections with the trees that had inhabited their lives unnoticed. This is a big novel which is not afraid to cast the majestic trees from Illinois to California as indispensable characters. Spanning the 1980’s through the present, the natural world is revealed to be a larger force in people’s lives than they ever imagined; causing the awakening of some and the downfall of others.
San Diego Public Library, USA