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The Overstory
Cover of The Overstory
The Overstory
The million-copy global bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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Brought to you by Penguin.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe
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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett


'The best book I've read in ten years' Emma Thompson


'Dazzlingly written' Robert Macfarlane

© Richard Powers 2018 (P) Penguin Audio 2018

Brought to you by Penguin.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe
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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

'Really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett


'The best book I've read in ten years' Emma Thompson


'Dazzlingly written' Robert Macfarlane

© Richard Powers 2018 (P) Penguin Audio 2018

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Awards-
About the Author-
  • Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory and his most recent novel, Bewilderment, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    February 19, 2018
    Occupying the same thematic terrain as Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, the latest from Powers (Orfeo) is an impassioned but unsatisfying paean to the wonder of trees. Set primarily on the West Coast, the story revolves around nine characters, separated by age and geography, whose “lives have long been connected, deep underground.” Among these are a wheelchair-bound computer game designer; a scientist who uncovers the forest’s hidden communication systems; a psychologist studying the personality types of environmental activists; and a young woman who, after being electrocuted, hears voices urging her to save old-growth forests from logging. All are seduced by the majesty of trees and express their arboreal love in different ways: through scholarship, activism, art, and even violent resistance. Some of the prose soars, as when a redwood trunk shoots upward in a “russet, leathery apotheosis,” while some lands with a thud: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” Powers’s best works are thrilling accounts of characters blossoming as they pursue their intellectual passions; here, few of the earnest figures come alive on the page. While it teems with people, information, and ideas, the novel feels curiously barren.

  • AudioFile Magazine Richard Powers's ambitious new novel tests the limits of audiobook narration in its breadth and complexity, number of characters and storylines it embraces, and sweeping conception of the bond between humanity and nature. Suzanne Toren's performance is expressive and well paced, and she is especially effective when delivering Powers's more lyrical passages. However, as the four featured characters fight to preserve a virgin forest, Toren's character voices are uneven--sometimes a marvelous expression of situation and state of mind, other times a regrettable mimicry of gender or ethnicity. So powerful are Powers's interlocking stories that the listener is simply carried along. This is a novel that many will embrace. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
  • TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage A novel about the natural world - trees specifically - and our power as human beings to destroy it or redeem it. It reminds me that we are all connected and that there is still time to make things right
  • EMILIA CLARKE An extraordinary novel... It's an astonishing performance... The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference
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    Random House
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The Overstory
The Overstory
The million-copy global bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Richard Powers
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