A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most
'prodigiously talented' (The New York Times Book Review)
novelists.
Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
"Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees,
which makes me think of The Overstory, the best novel ever written
about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period." --
Ann Patchett
"An extraordinary novel ... It's an astonishing performance ...He's
incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into
poetry ...The book is full of ideas ... Like Moby-Dick, The
Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference
... Some of what was happening to his characters passed into my
conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling
behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down. Which is one
test of the quality of a novel." -- Ben Markovits * Guardian *
"The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees
as Moby-Dick does about whales ... The Overstory is that novel and
it is very nearly a masterpiece ... The encyclopaedic powers of
Powers extend from the sciences to the literary classics. On almost
every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine
precision and vision. You will learn new facts about trees ... [An]
exhilarating read." * The Times *
"[The Overstory] whirls together so many characters, so much
research and such a jostle of intersecting ideas that, at times, it
feels like a landbound companion to Moby-Dick's digressional and
obsessive whale tale ... One of the most thoughtful and involving
novels I've read for years ... This long book is astonishingly
light on its feet, and its borrowings from real research are
conducted with verve ... The propulsive style and the enthusiastic
reverence of Powers's writing about nature keep it whizzing through
any amount of linked observations on literary criticism, political
science and statistical analysis. It's an extraordinary novel,
alert to the large ideas and humanely generous to the small ones;
in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures,
it blossoms." -- Tim Martin * Daily Telegraph *
"Big brainy books bristling with formidable versatility have been
Powers's speciality since he launched his highly idiosyncratic
fictional career ... The Overstory is a hugely ambitious eco-fable
... An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world, the book
is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument
... [Pages] teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal.
Angry energy pulses through scenes ... Valiant." -- Peter Kemp *
Sunday Times *
"I have thought about The Overstory ever since reading it last
year... For me, what was so radical and exciting about this novel
was the fact that the trees are probably more important than the
human beings who trundle around them causing chaos. It was the
first "eco-lit" novel I've read that made me stop and truly realise
how sophisticated trees are, how magisterially brilliant. And, in a
world where finally, collectively, we are acknowledging the threat
of climate crisis, it reminded me of how important they are to the
planet's survival" -- Jessie Burton * Guardian *
"No less a writer than Margaret Atwood has said of Richard Powers
that "it's not possible for him to write an uninteresting book". On
the evidence of The Overstory, he is continuing a remarkable run
... This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines
the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with a
paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps
pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are
unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own ... Written
with a freshness that belies the well-worn subject matter ... As
befits a book that spans centuries, there is a richness and
allusiveness to the prose that reaches back as far as Thoreau's
Walden, and Emerson is an acknowledged touchstone. The Overstory is
high-minded but never precious ... [A] majestic redwood of a novel
... It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope. As with
Larkin, a belief that humanity is capable of redeeming itself and
beginning "afresh, afresh, afresh"." * Observer *
"His monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living
writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt ... The
Overstory is a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking
hoodwink ... The opener is a gorgeous family saga with the texture
of a Ken Burns documentary ... we're in the hands of Richard
Powers, winner of a genius grant, a storyteller of such grand scope
that Margaret Atwood was moved to ask: "If Powers were an American
writer of the 19th century, which writer would he be? He'd probably
be the Herman Melville of Moby Dick." His picture really is that
big ... Trees will bring these small lives together into large acts
of war, love, loyalty and betrayal ... The descriptions of this
deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from
300 feet up, stand with any prose I've ever read ... The science in
this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by
characters ... who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the
relatable ways ... This is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held
together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between
fictional friend, lovers, parents and children." -- Barbara
Kingsolver * New York Times Book Review *
"Richard Powers has a mighty purpose for The Overstory ... He is
absolutely serious. He wants to pull down "the sense of
exceptionalism we humans carry around inside us" ... Epically
ambitious. In the face of climate change, Powers scorns fiction
that restricts itself to individual human stories, "private hopes,
fears and desires". His fiction aims to be nothing less than
environmental ... He writes such good prose ... Powers has to be
admired for the sheer scale of this creation and the passion he has
poured into it." -- David Sexton * Evening Standard *
"The Great American Novel has been written many times. From Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) to Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997),
American authors have produced works of sweeping grandeur that
attempt to capture a people at a point in history. Yet these
national epics have - you might conclude after reading The
Overstory - failed to see the wood for the trees. ... Richard
Powers' 12th novel is a rare specimen: a Great American Eco-Novel
... Yet the literary greats that really inform Powers' thinking and
writing are the Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Walt
Whitman, as well as the metaphysical poets ... But the great
literary tap root that grounds his sprawling novel is Ovid's The
Metamorphoses ... The great fork that took us away from our natural
environment and other living things, that led us to a place where
we have unthinkingly destroyed forest after forest and species
after species must be challenged, argues Powers, and challenged
through stories. "The best arguments in the world won't change a
person's mind," he writes. "The only thing that can do that is a
good story." This is a good story. It will change the way you look
at trees." * Financial Times *
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