The Overstory, Richard Powers
The Overstory, Richard Powers
32 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Overstory

Bestseller

Author: Richard Powers

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 22 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/03/2018

Categories: Fiction, Psychological


Synopsis

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review). The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. 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. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. 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.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Hannah on April 29, 2024

I'm on BookTube again! Come find me at Hello, Bookworm📚🐛 Richard Powers’ structural approach to The Overstory breaks with traditional plotting. The result is two books in one, each designed to appeal to a different type of reader. The flaw in this approach is that the book either reads like a lit......more

Goodreads review by Roxane on June 20, 2019

This book has an interesting structure and it is well-written. I get what Powers is going for conceptually. The character sketches, which read like short stories are wonderful. But then the book gets... less engaging, shall we say. I stopped reading it because I just could not read one more passage......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on October 05, 2018

The Overstory is undeniably brilliant, but it's also hard work, and I'm not convinced the payoff was worth the effort. I wanted to be able to say that I was so struck by Powers' genius that I was able to forgive the periods of abject tedium that characterized my reading experience, but that would be......more

Goodreads review by Justin on August 30, 2020

The Overstory is part short stories, part tree porn, part rant, and part ramble. It adds up to an impressive literary achievement that will linger with me for a long time, even while the reading experience is generally tedious. At times the characters are intriguing, at least once does plot play a......more

Goodreads review by Always on March 01, 2022

I'm actually not quite sure how I felt about this one but also spoilers are going to follow before anyone gets angry at me. The book starts out by telling what are seemingly separate stories about a variety of characters, so at first I thought it was just going to be a collection of short stories. T......more