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 hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.
These, and 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. From the roots to the crown and back to seeds, The Overstory, by Richard Powers 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, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected,resourceful, magnificently inventive, & almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world & who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?
GPL: F Powers