The Overstory is an exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.
A group of strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, is brought together to save it from catastrophe. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate 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. Moving through history and across landscapes, Richard Powers unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the planet in The Overstory.
‘It’s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book’ Margaret Atwood
. . . from the Trees
In Issue 75, I said some books help you grow. Others help you let go. Our son was 17 when he disappeared. I’ll call him R. We bought our place that was big enough to plant trees when he was 14....
Read moreSeeing the Wood . . .
Some books grow on you. Others help you grow. In January 1990, aged 24 and not long out of drama school, I landed a job: six months touring an Alan Ayckbourn play round secondary schools in northern...
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