The Overstory

The Overstory

Richard Powers

#151 of 8,085 books · #74 in Fiction

Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2019). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 2 other awards.

The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for over one year, and was named one of the best books of the 21st century by the New York Times Book Review. The Overstory 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.