WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe
'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett
'The best book I've read in ten years' Emma Thompson
'Dazzlingly written' Robert Macfarlane
'Breathtaking' Barbara Kingsolver
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
'The best... Should be mandatory reading the world over'
Emilia Clarke
'It's a masterpiece'
Tim Winton
'Radical and exciting'
Jessie Burton
Industry Reviews
"[The Overstory] whirls together so many characters, so much research and such a jostle of intersecting ideas that, at times, it feels like a landbound companion to Moby-Dick's digressional and obsessive whale tale ... One of the most thoughtful and involving novels I've read for years ... This long book is astonishingly light on its feet, and its borrowings from real research are conducted with verve ... The propulsive style and the enthusiastic reverence of Powers's writing about nature keep it whizzing through any amount of linked observations on literary criticism, political science and statistical analysis. It's an extraordinary novel, alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones; in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures, it blossoms."
