Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. 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.

A Novel

The Overstory

After a couple of false starts over the past few years, at the start of the year I decided to take my time with this 625-page novel.

I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize; it's science journalism wrapped in, at times, beautiful prose. The stories that make up the 'overstory' start off as tiny vignettes, as leaves that develop into branches, before the main trunk of the storey becomes more visible towards the end.

That being said, I didn't love this book. I found the stories too fragmented to cohere into a meaningful whole. Also, the message I took away from it was that we're doomed as a species but Nature will be OK when we're gone. That may be true, but it comes across as a little... defeatist.

Doug Belshaw

After a couple of false starts over the past few years, at the start of the year I decided to take my time with this 625-page novel.

I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize; it's science journalism wrapped in, at times, beautiful prose. The stories that make up the 'overstory' start off as tiny vignettes, as leaves that develop into branches, before the main trunk of the storey becomes more visible towards the end.

That being said, I didn't love this book. I found the stories too fragmented to cohere into a meaningful whole. Also, the message I took away from it was that we're doomed as a species but Nature will be OK when we're gone. That may be true, but it comes across as a little... defeatist.

Doug Belshaw's review of

The Overstory by Richard Powers

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