Why did I love this book?
Overstory weaves together stories of people related to trees. Or maybe the opposite, trees related to people. Obviously not a catchy and engaging intro to one of my all-time favorite books. Yet this book envelops the reader in trees, their environments, how they grow, the cycle of life produced by trees. Most importantly Overstory details the connection trees have to all life on this Earth. You will never walk by a fallen branch, regard an emerging root, take a breath outside, pick up a leaf, or view a landscape in the same way again.
24 authors picked The Overstory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…
