Moving through America's history and its landscape, this is a wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
"Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees,
which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written
about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period." --
Ann Patchett
"An extraordinary novel ... It's an astonishing performance ...He's
incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into
poetry ...The book is full of ideas ... Like Moby-Dick, The
Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference
... Some of what was happening to his characters passed into my
conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling
behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down. Which is one
test of the quality of a novel." -- Ben Markovits * Guardian *
"The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees
as Moby-Dick does about whales ... The Overstory is that novel and
it is very nearly a masterpiece ... The encyclopaedic powers of
Powers extend from the sciences to the literary classics. On almost
every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine
precision and vision. You will learn new facts about trees ... [An]
exhilarating read." * The Times *
"[The Overstory] whirls together so many characters, so much
research and such a jostle of intersecting ideas that, at times, it
feels like a landbound companion to Moby-Dick's digressional and
obsessive whale tale ... One of the most thoughtful and involving
novels I've read for years ... This long book is astonishingly
light on its feet, and its borrowings from real research are
conducted with verve ... The propulsive style and the enthusiastic
reverence of Powers's writing about nature keep it whizzing through
any amount of linked observations on literary criticism, political
science and statistical analysis. It's an extraordinary novel,
alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones;
in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures,
it blossoms." -- Tim Martin * Daily Telegraph *
"Big brainy books bristling with formidable versatility have been
Powers's speciality since he launched his highly idiosyncratic
fictional career ... The Overstory is a hugely ambitious eco-fable
... An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world, the book
is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument
... [Pages] teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal.
Angry energy pulses through scenes ... Valiant." -- Peter Kemp *
Sunday Times *
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