The Overstory

Author Powers, Richard
Year 2018
First published 2018
Publisher London: Penguin
Number of pages 502
Edition First UK Paperback
ISBN 9781785151644
Keywords botany, ecology, habitat at risk, literary or mainstream, USA or Canada, FMS Library Book

Abstract

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. (richardpowers.net)