Books › The Overstory
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2019
The Overstory
640 pages
A sprawling, deeply rooted epic that shifts your perception of time and the natural world.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like watching a forest grow: it demands patience at first, laying down deep, separate roots before slowly intertwining them into a massive, breathtaking canopy. The prose is dense, lyrical, and scientifically precise, wrapping you in an atmosphere of profound awe and creeping ecological grief. It operates on a different scale of time than most novels, asking you to slow down and look at the world through a non-human lens. The mood shifts from quiet, isolated wonder to urgent, desperate activism, leaving a lingering sense of melancholy and reverence. It is a perfect match for patient readers who crave sprawling, multi-perspective literary fiction that fundamentally alters how they walk through the woods.
- Mood
- awe-inspiring
- melancholic
- expansive
- immersive
- Tone
- earnest
- reverent
- urgent
- philosophical
- elegiac
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- ecological grief · interconnectedness of life · human insignificance · radicalization · the sublime
- The writing
- Lyrical, dense, and scientifically precise, blending poetic reverence with botanical detail.
- The arc
- Begins with isolated wonder and deep roots, branches into urgent, interconnected activism, and settles into a lingering, melancholic awe.
- Who it's for
- Patient readers who love sprawling, multi-perspective literary fiction that wrestles with big ideas and demands deep reflection.
Content notes
- environmental destruction
- suicide
- police brutality
- grief
- violence
About the book
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
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.
Description from Open Library.
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