The Overstory A Novel [Hardcover]

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.Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think ofMonumental&Remarkable....This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.A big, ambitious epic....Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the bookthe arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failureare thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powerss prose, which persuades you on the very first page that youre hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species.A rousing, full-throated hymn to Natures grandeur.An extraordinary novel....An astonishing performance....There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life.Powers is the rare American novelist writing inthe grand realist tradition, daring to cast himself, in the critic PeterBrookss term, as a 'historian of contemporary society.' He has the courage andintellectual stamina to explore our most complex social questions withoriginality, nuance, and an innate skepticism about dogma. At a time whenliterary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personalexperience, Powerss ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the forman authority it has shirked.This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It's not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around usló5