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The Overstory

The Overstory

A Novel
Literary FictionHistorical Fiction
Pages
502
Published
2019
Language
English

Synopsis

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. 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.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

PhilosophicalComplexAtmosphericReflective
Multiple POVsDual TimelineSacrifice

Genres

Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Nature

About the author

R
Richard M. Powers

Richard M. Powers was an American science fiction and fantasy fiction illustrator. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016. Born in Chicago into a Catholic family, Richard Michael Gorman Powers spent most of his early life supported by his mother and aunt. His father left the family when Powers was young. At eleven, Powers was introduced to art when his uncle gave him a sketch book, although in later life his uncle's w...

Characters

Olivia VandergriffProtagonist

A reckless college student who, after surviving a near-death electrocution, begins hearing voices from the natural world that compel her to travel west and join the forest defense movement.

Nicholas HoelProtagonist

An artist descended from a long line of Iowa farmers who inherited a monthly photographic archive of a single, blight-surviving American chestnut tree.

Patricia WesterfordProtagonist

A visionary, marginalized botanist whose pioneering research reveals that trees are highly social, communicative, and interconnected organisms.

Mimi MaProtagonist

A successful ceramic engineer and daughter of a Chinese immigrant who is radicalized into environmental activism after witnessing the destruction of trees outside her office.

Douglas PavlicekProtagonist

A wounded Vietnam War veteran who, after being saved by a falling banyan tree, dedicates his life to replanting forests and fighting industrial logging.

All characters in The Overstory

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