The Overstory

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

`The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period'
Ann Patchett

`Dazzlingly written'
Robert Macfarlane

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.

`Breathtaking'
Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times

`It's a masterpiece'
Tim Winton

`It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book'
Margaret Atwood

`An astonishing performance'
Benjamin Markovits, Guardian