The Overstory
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.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
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.
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"
Should be mandatory reading the world over.--Emilia Clarke
A towering achievement by a major writer.--Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
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
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
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
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
The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.--Ann Patchett
The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers's The Overstory does this. Haunting.--Geraldine Brooks
