From Powells.com
Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Staff Pick
In The Overstory, Richard Powers has created a beautiful tribute to nature, connection, activism, and home, and I was captivated from the first page. In this interlocking story with multiple time periods and characters, we are reminded that there is still so much to learn about our world. Recommended By Leah C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“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
"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
About the Author
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.