The Overstory

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

  • 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

    TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage

  • An extraordinary novel… It’s an astonishing performance… The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference

    Guardian

  • Should be mandatory reading the world over

    EMILIA CLARKE

  • 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

  • One of the most thoughtful and involving novels I’ve read for years… Extraordinary

    Daily Telegraph

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