Fiction: 509 pages

This book is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. This is Powers' twelfth novel. He was inspired to write the work while teaching at Stanford University, after he encountered giant redwood trees for the first time. “Powers is the rare American novelist writing in the grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the Atlantic critic Peter Brooks’ term, as a “historian of contemporary society. He has the courage and intellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions with originality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Powers’ ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked.”

People see better what looks like them,” observes the field biologist Patricia Westerford, one of the nine—nine—main characters the novel. And trees, Patricia discovers, look like people. They are social creatures, caring for one another, communicating, learning, trading goods and services; despite lacking a brain, trees are “aware.” After borers attack a sugar maple, it emits insecticides that warn its neighbors, which respond by intensifying their own defenses. When the roots of two Douglas firs meet underground, they fuse, joining vascular systems; if one tree gets ill, the other cares for it. The chopping down of a tree causes those surrounding it to weaken, as if in mourning. Trees speak, sing, experience pain, dream, remember the past, and predict the future. The past and the future, it turns out, are mirror images of each other. Neither contains people.

The Overstory was a contender for multiple awards. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the William Dean Howells Medal in 2020. Reviews of the novel have been mostly positive, with praise of the structure, writing, and compelling reading experience. 

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