The Overstory

Nine strangers, their lives quietly bent by trees, move toward a common cause in Richard Powers's sprawling ecological epic. Among them are Nicholas Hoel, heir to an Iowa family chronicle told through a lone surviving chestnut; Patricia Westerford, a hearing-impaired botanist ridiculed for arguing that trees communicate; Olivia Vandergriff, a student jolted into activism after a near-death experience; and Adam Appich, a psychologist drawn into the movement. Their stories, rooted separately, branch and entwine as several are pulled into direct action to defend the last old-growth forests of the American West. Powers, whose structure critics likened to the growth of a tree itself, was praised for the ambition and moral seriousness of a book one reviewer called darkly optimistic, even as its activists edge toward extremism. It is a novel about deep time and human blindness, about what we owe the non-human world, and about whether a species can learn to see past its own lifespan.