The Overstory (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Richard Powers

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Like us, Barbara Kingsolver is a fan of this epic, unputdownable novel about the natural world and our deep-seeded connection to it.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List
Named One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

"The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356687
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Overstory, Bewilderment, and Orfeo. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Hometown:

Urbana, Illinois

Date of Birth:

June 18, 1957

Place of Birth:

Evanston, Illinois

Education:

M.A., University of Illinois, 1979

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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

"A towering achievement by a major writer."— Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

"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

"The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting."— Geraldine Brooks

"This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.… Remarkable."— Ron Charles The Washington Post

"The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period."— Ann Patchett

"Should be mandatory reading the world over."— Emilia Clarke

"I'll never see a tree the same way again."— Louis Sachar New York Times

"I’ve read a lot of good books, but the last truly great book I read was The Overstory, by Richard Powers."— Ed Helms New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2019 Pulitzer Prize, Winner
2019 Chautauqua Prize, Short-listed
2020 William Dean Howells Medal, Winner
2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Runner-up

…most [novelists] don't know beans about botany. Richard Powers is the exception, and his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of 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…The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters—some scientists, mostly not—who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways…all invested with touching humanity, and they arrive with such convincing, fully formed résumés, it's hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they're real people. (They aren't.) This is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children…Even if you've never given a thought to the pulp and timber industries, by this book's last page you will probably wish you weren't reading it on the macerated, acid-bleached flesh of its protagonists. That's what a story can do.

The New York Times Book Review - Barbara Kingsolver