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The Overstory: A Novel by [Richard Powers]

The Overstory: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Richard Powers (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Winner of the William Dean Howells Medal

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Over One Year on the New York Times Bestseller List

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.

Print length

502 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

April 3, 2018
File size

5847 KB
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Popular Highlights in this book

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There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
Highlighted by 9,843 Kindle readers
Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
Highlighted by 8,603 Kindle readers
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Highlighted by 7,530 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Bewilderment by Richard Powers, now in paperback

The Overstory - Best Book of the Year in Literature and Fiction

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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 --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels, including The Overstory and Orfeo, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B073VX7HT4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 3, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 3, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5847 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 502 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #6,799 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Political Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #17 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #48 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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17,211 global ratings

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Jean Lemeussner

Long read but a good one

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 29, 2023

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Really enjoyed the book. The author did an amazing job with the characters, plot, and tying A LOT together. Took a bit to get into it but once I got about a quarter through I couldn’t put it down. Loved the environmental theme and the topics of environmentalism, law, capitalism, love, and humanity clashing together. Highly recommend reading

One person found this helpful

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Erik

Because 'Tree' & 'Truth' Share the Same Root

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 25, 2020

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In this Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory, one of the characters offered some profound advice to his students. “You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”

Before we bought our current family home, we visited. With most of the furniture moved out and life hidden from view, the rooms were staged for a buyer.

All except the young boy with autism, who could not be subdued during our tour of the home for sale. He sat on the couch and jumped up to pace, groans for words, his hands thrown against his stomach in uncomfortable, unpredictable bursts. His mother, long in patience and able to see what most could not, interpreted his enthusiasm for us and for our young children.

His mother saw what we could not, knew everything was fine.

In her son’s honor and in his name, a young tree had been planted years prior in the backyard of the house that we wanted to buy, because the boy’s parents understood. They saw. They did not fail to notice.

Yes, we bought the home and our children played for hours in that backyard. We did not see the boy’s tree, just as we didn’t see the boy.

The author of this book has caused me to see that tree, and others, much differently.

Other trees including the ones no longer there. The author screams his warning to see their disappearance, page aftrr page.

Our children chose instead to live in the wild little forest growing on the edge of our property line, beneath the boy's tree. Here, they buried their childhood.

Deceptively dense on a postage stamp of swamp, this little forest was rife with potato vines, knee-high undergrowth and thin trunks that bent in the wind to shake off little white flowers. It sheltered courage within the walls of a young boy’s fort; it sprouted imagination in a backlot to short films on a young girl's handheld camera. Those leaves and vines covered hope and shame and anger and joy and love and peace.

Then, just as our children all entered their teens, our little town outgrew itself. Progress sent machines to tear down our forest and build a mandatory retention pond.

Every vine, every stump, every little white flower was erased from the yard and forever from the planet, so that our neighbors could use more water and so that the water would have some place to go other than out onto our dirt roads. Against our will, the machines tore away everything but the autistic boy’s tree. Quietly, this had grown tall, with a trunk too wide to hug.

Today, that tree is the lone survivor of our backyard forest. This beautiful, magnificent tower of memory tells the stories of my three kids’ childhood.

I just finished reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. I read it because I love trees (not just the one in my backyard), and because I want to read good writing. This book offers both.

Powers tells the stories of 9 characters whose lives all profoundly intersect with trees. And what do all stories do, one of those characters asks in the book? “[Good stories] kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t” (page 412).

Is that why I read? To become something I wasn’t? To grow? Or to put it another way, to die just a little? Is it death?

The author wants us to think about the environment like we’ve not thought about it before. He doesn’t serve up a green brochure or a scientific journal article disguised as a flimsy four-part play. He introduces us to people and pulls them together in ways that surprise and distress and move and frighten his reader. After all, propaganda about the destruction of trees would not make us think differently. We would just see what we think we see without understanding, without knowing.

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind,” says one of the characters in this book. “The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

He got me thinking anyway. Powers ends his novel on the second to last page with a reminder that “the word ‘tree’ and the word ‘truth’ come from the same root” (page 500).

Because of his story, I see trees with new eyes. But Powers begs his readers to do more than just listen and nod. He storytells his heart out and, in return, begs me to die a little.

26 people found this helpful

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karen wilson

Powers speaks the language of life, all life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2023

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Through masterfully interwoven stories - across generations, ethnicities, and cultures - Powers reveals the greatest story of all - the one told by trees and their relationship to humankind.

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Arbor Day

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2018

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What of the life of a tree? Will it live on to sing its epic ballad, vibratory, electric, never ceasing to deliver free food and shelter for its own and other species? Or will it be cut short by a race of highly evolved life forms who, in the thrall of rabid capitalism, will do anything to show a quarterly profit? This is one of the question raised by Richard Power's latest novel The Overstory, a sprawling chestnut tree of a tale which delves into the lives of nine unique souls who seem to find a commonality by story's end. Powers seeds his work with these characters, feeding and watering them steadily until they finally sprout into a coherent composition with tendrils rooted squarely in place and crowns reaching up into the ether.

The trunk of the novel takes shape when one of the nine, Olivia Vandergriff, a fresh dropout from some unnamed northern college, who has already died by electrocution, been revived- reborn so to speak- is visited suddenly by "presences" which lead her in a vaguely southwestern direction to another of Powers' nine; and to her destiny. The artist, Nick Hoel, comes from a long line of American Chestnut tree photographers, Iowa farmers really, Brooklyn, New York transplants. He has carried through on a multi-generational project: photographing the sole surviving family Chestnut from the same position every month for over seventy years. It becomes a sort of flip book peek into natural history through the dilatory filter of persistent life. When the two meet it ignites the slow burn of the author's motif.

And just what is that motif? It's about seeing, really observing, the natural world beyond the blinkered focus on our fellow human beings. Powers' has said "there is a natural predisposition, I think, in the affordance of the brain to be blind to things that don't look like us, but that's the miracle of awareness and... of human intelligence." But mostly this book is about finding a larger purpose in our lives, about recognizing the big picture by (ironically enough) seeing the trees in the forest. How the simplicity of a tree's life can teach us how to live.

When, during a nocturnal attempt to destroy a forest-clearing building site, a group of eco-terrorists lose one of their own to an infernal accident, they plot their escape and their future. "Say nothing, no matter what. Time is with us." says one. Then we are treated to a short treatise on the nature of time and it's as if the surrounding trees themselves are speaking, warning them:

"But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died."

In The Overstory, Powers' correlation of his characters with the arboreal is constant. We are all connected, he seems to be saying, through this collective system of roots which proliferate across the earth. We sustain and support each other with protection and innate caring or we destroy each other through viral hate and greed. But regardless we are all one. This is a big, big tale. It pans from the microscopic out to the satellite view of our world. By the end we are left with the inevitable; nothing and everything. We read this, as one is left to ponder the future:

"He stares off into the north woods, where the next project beckons. Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end."

It's with that profound sense of eternity that Powers leaves us. Ineluctably, life goes on whether our frail attempt at righteous change is successful or not. We evolve regardless of our petty endeavors for wealth and pleasure. If we care enough to survive as a sentient species, we must reap the gift, we must accept it.

As one of the nine comes to realize at the twilight of her life, "The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story". And that is exactly what Richard Powers has told.

96 people found this helpful

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Camp Runamok

A fun read, but I'm surprised by all the awards.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 29, 2022

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The Overstory, a 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction is, about 9 people whose stories come together because of trees, amid the consequences of deforestation. Done in the manner of a life cycle of a tree, it's a fun, albeit sometimes confusing book, with some very interesting and clever characters. However, I'm a little surprised that it was shortlisted for and/or won so many awards, just because it's also one of the most melodramatic books I've read in years. Everything is done in high drama, with the author using every emotional trick in the book to pull our heartstrings all over his world map. It's kind of unfortunate, but the melodramatic nature of the book makes me question the accuracy of the science. Is it real, or is it just being used for melodramatic effect. A fun book, but in the end, not the 5* experience I expected.

19 people found this helpful

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Maryam

It's a beautiful environmental fiction rich with references.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 20, 2021

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This environmental fiction is perfectly timed to highlight today’s issues of climate change. The sentence on the first page, “There are more ways to branch than a cedar pencil will ever find” was a promising start for me as it brought images of fractals to the mind. The prose does keep that promise throughout the book. It is rich with information and references about trees. I found out about the blight that killed more than 3 billion American chestnut trees in the early 1900s; the Old Tjikko tree which is almost 10,000-year-old root but a century old trunk; the quaking Aspens that propagate through a single connected root-system near Colorado and make up one 6000-tonne organism, and much more. I loved reading the diversity of connections made between trees and the rest of living organisms.

The book follows nine individuals as they develop awareness of the importance of the green beings. Five of the characters get together and their life connects at some point. The journey of rest was followed separately in the book. The character Neelay, a computer game coder, seemed reduntant but his relationship portrayed with his father was beautiful. I felt that the characters should have had more of a connection together. The story, for me felt a bit disconnected as I had expected the characters to come together and give the plot direction. The prose though made up for the lack of flow for me. Maybe, the author wanted to keep it that way to show that individual human life doesn’t have a deeper meaning in the grander scheme of this world, that in the end it’s not the trees that need saving, it’s the human race.

5 people found this helpful

Tadhg V Keane

"How lovely trees are"- Carl Sagan

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 5, 2023

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I asked my Old Man's parochialism if I could take that there acre of monocultured pines under his current custodianship and just mix it up a little with native Irish rainforest wood when my turn comes. I asked if I could just do 'nothing' to it. Just let it grow. He said no. He's still saying no... So, I'm going to ask again tomorrow. And then the next day. And the day after that.

I'm all for the symmetry of Euclidian geometry but I asked my myopic Mother if she'd stop cutting the lawn. An utterly static statue laughed at me. But ya know what- I'll keep asking her too.

Each day I ask, they keep asking back: 'but why?'

And I tell 'em as it is.

It's because Douggie made me cry.

Powers lad- as we say in Cork: 'yer no egg, but you're some yolk'. Keep at it Brother.

Robert Alan Davidson

Minority Opinion

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 4, 2018

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I wanted very much to love this book. And I did for the first 2/3. The individual stories were all vivid and compelling. The pulling of them together was masterful and the actions they undertook exciting. Full disclosure: With considerable less talent for saying something as well as Richard Powers, I wrote an essay 40 years ago suggesting strongly that the world did not need the forest industry any longer. The Earth needed oxygen creation and CO2 scrubbing more than it needed another piece of dimensional lumber. We have substitutes, something I learned watching high-rise buildings being erected and demised without the use of much wood. Not to mention the crassness and cruelty of an industry that scars the planet and dumps its practitioners as soon as the price/quantity of their product slips below a predetermined level. So I was already a convert to the novel's premise and I was excited by the revelations contained in those initial chapters. But then things began to unravel for me. I understand the author forgoing a positive resolution to his story when such a resolution would push the boundaries of reality in this crass commercial world we inhabit but to take a third of the book to beat his protagonists and his ideas into submission came across for me as overkill. I kept waiting for the brilliant speech that would sum up the miracle of discovering both our ignorance of the power of nature and revealing the astonishing world of trees and plants. It never came. Surely, I thought, a novel based upon such exciting scientific discoveries deserved a better finish, a suggestion, perhaps, that it might not be too late, even if the odds are depressingly high that it is too late. I thought this superb story deserved that.

34 people found this helpful

GREATLYAMUSED

Cumulative storytelling.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 7, 2018

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Taken as a whole, The Overstory (whilst a collection of shorter stories) has the feel of a John Irving novel. Broad in scope and rich in detail. Excellent.

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