The Overstory: A Novel (Paperback)

Description

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List

A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year



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

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, 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, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel 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.

About the Author

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Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Praise For…

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It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.... It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.
— Barack Obama

The best book I’ve read in 10 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.
— Emma Thompson

An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them.
— citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

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

A towering achievement by a major writer.
— Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

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

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

— Geraldine Brooks

This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.… Remarkable.
— Ron Charles - The Washington Post

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

Should be mandatory reading the world over.
— Emilia Clarke