Overstory

No cover

Richard Powers: Overstory (2018, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.)

512 pages

English language

Published Jan. 6, 2018 by Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W..

ISBN:
978-0-393-63553-9
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (34 reviews)

The Overstory, winner of the 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.

4 editions

The Secret of Trees

5 stars

(em português → sol2070.in/2023/09/O-segredo-das-%C3%A1rvores)

I think "The Overstory" (2018), by Richard Powers, was the best fiction I've ever read. "I think" because I didn't stop to create a ranking, but I can't remember anything so powerful.

I finished a second reading with a more intense impression than the first. In recent years, this was one of the only books I wanted to re-read immediately after finishing -- the other was Jeff Vandermeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy.

They say that the perfect book is the one you finish with the feeling of not being the same person anymore. A critic said that about "The Overstory" and, yes, absolutely. The work -- which won the Pullitzer Prize for best fiction in 2019 -- manages to open up perception and empathy with other beings in this profound dimension of the interconnectedness of life.

It's a story that gradually interconnects the lives of nine people …

let it rewrite your relationship to trees and time

5 stars

This book pulled me into its world of trees and gutted me. I loved the richly drawn human characters and the stories they and the author tell about and learn from trees. I didn’t love the whiteness of the book, but also the relationship Powers describes between people and trees is a particularly white western one—some sense of indigenous stewardship before the end would have made that less irksome. But the book is beautiful and devastating to read, and I can’t stop thinking about trees.

Review of 'The Overstory' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This is beautiful writing, full of wonder and especially admiration for nature. I've always had deep cynical tendencies, in the Diogenes sense of that word, and while the pandemic was bringing those back to the surface this book lit them on fire. It doesn't offer pleasant answers, and maybe that's realistic, but it does offer beauty and sympathy that I was grateful for.

Review of 'The Overstory' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Usually when I finish reading a thick book as full of knowledge and wisdom as [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s National Book award-winning [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098.SY75.jpg|57662223] my primary feeling is one of accomplishment. In this case, however, that's overshadowed by regret that I won't be able to read it for the first time again.
I'd be awful at describing it to anyone I know without turning them off to the idea of reading it. It's about nine people and the relation they have to trees. See? Trees. Uck. For most of them, the relation is an intense one that fills their thoughts and days. For the others, trees turn out to be what their lives hinge on in a variety of ways. But this is where I have to shut up because I'm going to start sounding like if you're not nuts about trees this book will have nothing …

avatar for tigar

rated it

5 stars
avatar for loam

rated it

4 stars
avatar for haagen_daz

rated it

2 stars
avatar for dstokes

rated it

5 stars
avatar for scully

rated it

5 stars
avatar for maxbittker

rated it

4 stars
avatar for JoeGermuska

rated it

5 stars
avatar for smithclay

rated it

5 stars
avatar for kataract

rated it

4 stars
avatar for gerwitz

rated it

4 stars
avatar for wiebkehere

rated it

5 stars
avatar for erinmalone

rated it

5 stars
avatar for ChrisIkin

rated it

4 stars
avatar for Acton007

rated it

5 stars
avatar for Hyzie

rated it

1 star
avatar for Kowalski162

rated it

4 stars
avatar for moohan

rated it

2 stars
avatar for StereoSoda

rated it

4 stars
avatar for samfirke

rated it

5 stars

Subjects

  • American fiction (fictional works by one author)
  • Fiction, political

Lists