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The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Human lives in the shadow of forests

Regular price $17.07 USD
Regular price $28.46 USD Sale price $17.07 USD
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Paperback New English

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Print BookUnavailable Hardcover $27.00 USD$45.00 USD
Print BookCurrently viewing Paperback $17.07 USD$28.46 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

    The source identifies The Overstory as the 2019 winner.

  • Editorial selection

    Named one of the New York Times Book Review's Best Books of the 21st Century

    Named one of the Best Books of the 21st Century.

  • Author recognition

    Richard Powers is a National Book Award winner

    The third-party description identifies Richard Powers as a National Book Award winner; this is an author accolad...

AlbakiReads Editorial

Human lives in the shadow of forests

Richard Powers builds the novel in concentric, interlocking stories, moving from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest. Across those different settings, people come to recognize a vast natural world that operates alongside human life, and become caught up in the damage unfolding around it. The structure links individual lives to questions of scale and connection: trees are not merely scenery, but part of a world with its own resources and patterns. Activism and resistance run through the book’s engagement with the natural world, giving its many strands a shared environmental focus.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in literary fiction built from interlocking stories.
  • Readers drawn to novels about forests, environmental activism, and resistance.
  • Readers interested in the Pacific Northwest Timber Wars and their wider context.

Themes

Interconnection between human and natural worldsEnvironmental activism and resistanceForests and ecological catastropheIndividual lives within larger systems

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

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.

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