The Overstory

Moving through America's history and its landscape, this is a wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.

The Overstory is the million-copy global bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

As seen on BBC 2's Between the Covers

'It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it' — Barack Obama

'Really, just one of the best novels, period' — Ann Patchett

This is a story where 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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

'It's not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book' — Margaret Atwood

'Radical and exciting' — Jessie Burton

'Breathtaking' — Barbara Kingsolver