The Overstory

von Richard Powers

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019

A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.

'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett

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.

'It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book' Margaret Atwood

'It's a masterpiece' Tim Winton

'Radical and exciting' Jessie Burton

'Breathtaking' Barbara Kingsolver 'Dazzlingly written' Robert Macfarlane