The Overstory
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 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.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
38mentions
24people
2019–2026years
87% recommend11% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If this piques anyone's fancy the Overstory by Richard Powers won the Pullitzer and is about trees communicating (and a bunch of other stuff).
- +1 for the hidden life of trees!
Try also:
- "Anthill" by E. O. Wilson
- "The Overstory" by Richard Powers
- "Oak: The Frame of Civilization" by William Bryant Logan
- "Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees" by William Bryant Logan
- "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Richard Powers' novel "The Overstory" takes this premise and wraps a wonderfully entertaining and fact-suffused novel around it. Highly recommended.
- This reminded me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, once you start seeing the world on the time and spatial scales of trees, everything shifts. Human timelines feel like flickers. It’s not just a change in perspective; it’s a change in what even counts as meaningful.
- The Overstory by Richard Powers - an intertwining of lives, as witnessed by the oldest beings on Earth, putting things into a rather different perspective.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - compassion and redemption, set in a terrifyingly plausible near future where the oil and tech companies have been replaced by gene and agro conglomerates. Calories or joules, it’s just energy.
Weaveworld by Clive Barker - a dark, fantastical yarn of vivid (sometimes grotesque) imagery, spinning a new take on the oldest tale, that of good vs. evil.
- Anyone interested in trees and/or great writing should read "The Overstory: A Novel", which earned author Richard Powers a well-deserved Pulitzer. Highly recommended.
