The Overstory: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Richard Powers' novel has sold over a million copies worldwide, and it's not hard to see why. Barack Obama said it changed how he thought about our place on Earth. Ann Patchett called it one of the best novels, full stop. High praise, but the book earns it. At its heart, this is a story about nine strangers, each drawn towards the natural world in ways that are strange, vivid, and utterly convincing. An artist inherits a century's worth of photographs, every single one depicting the same ill-fated American chestnut tree. A hard-living student electrocutes herself in the late 1980s, dies briefly, and returns to life touched by something she can't quite name. A scientist with impaired hearing and speech uncovers the quiet, astonishing fact that trees are talking to each other. An Air Force crewman, shot down over Vietnam, survives only because a banyan tree breaks his fall. These are just four of the nine lives Powers traces with patience and precision. Each character arrives at their moment of reckoning separately, then converges with the others in a desperate effort to protect what remains of the natural world. Jessie Burton described it as radical. Barbara Kingsolver called it breathtaking. Both are right. Powers writes about trees with the kind of attention most novelists reserve for people, and the effect is quietly disorienting in the best possible way.
- Author: Richard Powers
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-1804951781
- Pages: 640 pages