The Overstory

*THE MILLION-COPY GLOBAL BESTSELLER
*WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION*

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

'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it' Barack Obama

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

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

'Radical and exciting' Jessie Burton

'Breath-taking' Barbara Kingsolver




Genre: Literary Fiction

"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 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