The overstory

a novel

502 pages

English language

Published Oct. 30, 2018 by W.W. Norton & Company.

ISBN:
978-0-393-63552-2
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OCLC Number:
1028736643

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5 stars (17 reviews)

A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

4 editions

Review of 'The overstory' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

The author likes trees (Even those among us who call climate change a Chinese hoax can say that!) and he is dismayed as we approach the end of our times. He has created an extraordinary literary work that uses trees as an image, a metaphor, and an underlying structure at every level from the smallest expressed thought to the whole novel. Beginning with a series of short story-like introductions to the novel's human characters and their relationships with trees, we progress to another story about the battle to preserve trees in which our characters meet and interact, and to the dénouement of their lives corresponding to the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene epoch. The verbal richness of the work in its final pages leaves us with small traces of hope; the possibility that a character's massive online game is a new reality and the thought that maybe only …

Review of 'The overstory' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Overstory is an extraordinary novel, one of the best I read in the past few years. It a book of vast ambition and scope, a book that explores our relation with the natural world and more specifically with trees, these magnificent, complex beings that offer so much to our planet. Overstory is a book about trees.

Most of us, cannot see the trees around us. That’s because we only can identify with things that look like us. But humans and trees are interrelated. We still share a quarter of our genes with trees. Truth is, human life could not exist if there were no trees. A mature tree produces as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year. Trees are excellent carbon sinks, meaning they absorb carbon dioxide. Trees fight soil erosion, conserve rainwater, and reduce water runoff and sediment deposit after storms. They fight flooding. …

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Subjects

  • Forest conservation
  • Fiction
  • Trees
  • Forests and forestry