The Overstory

Ranging from the years before the Civil War to the Timber Wars fought in the Pacific Northwest late in the twentieth century and beyond, Richard Powers's twelfth novel interweaves the stories of nine Americans whose lives become bound up with trees. They include an Air Force loadmaster shot down over Vietnam who survives by falling into a banyan, an artist who inherits a century of photographs of one doomed American chestnut, an undergraduate electrocuted in the late 1980s and sent back to life, and a scientist with hearing and speech impairments who finds that trees communicate. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Bill Gates, in his 2021 summer reading picks, called it one of the most unusual novels he had read in years.