The Overstory

| 4.29 | 51,648 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sarah Dry, Martha Kearney, and 3 others. See all reviews

Ranked #1 in Forestry, Ranked #4 in Environment — see more rankings.

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... more
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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Overstory from the world's leading experts.

Kwame Anthony Appiah Feels at the beginning like a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees. (Source)

Sarah Dry I had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space. (Source)

Martha Kearney @omrgriffiths @BBCPM @RobGMacfarlane Great idea. Loved that book. (Source)

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