The Overstory

Reviews

"It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it.... It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading." — Barack Obama

"The best book I’ve read in 10 years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet." — Emma Thompson

"An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them." — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

"This book is beyond special.… It’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed." — Bill McKibben

"A towering achievement by a major writer." — Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

"Monumental… The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths." — Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review

"The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting." — Geraldine Brooks

"This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.… Remarkable." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period." — Ann Patchett

"Should be mandatory reading the world over." — Emilia Clarke