KS5/Adult Book Recommendation - The Overstory by Richard Powers

** LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 ** 

The Overstory 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: 

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.

About the Author

Richard Powers has been a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as a winner of the US National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of eight novels, including The Time of our Singing, Plowing the Dark, and Gain. He lives in Los Angeles.