The Overstory

Author: Richard Powers

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $33.00 AUD
  • : 9781785151644
  • : William Heinemann
  • : William Heinemann
  • : April 2017
  • : 32.99
  • : April 2018
  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Richard Powers
  • : Paperback
  • :
  • :
  • :
Barcode 9781785151644
9781785151644

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of The Overstory,the best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.? - Ann Patchett'It's a masterpiece.' - Tim Winton'It?s not possible for Powers to write an uninteresting book.' - Margaret AtwoodA monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most 'prodigiously talented' (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.The Overstoryunfolds 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-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 four, and five other strangers - each summoned in different ways by trees - are brought together in a last and violent 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.

Author description

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, including Orfeo (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark. He is the recipient of a MacArthur grant and the National Book Award, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time NBCC finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.