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Title details for The Overstory by Richard Powers - Available

The Overstory

by Richard Powers
Suzanne Toren
Audiobook
95 of 95 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
95 of 95 copies available
A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review). The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable 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 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    April 3, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781501977657
      • File size: 661703 KB
      • Duration: 22:58:32

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 19, 2018
      Occupying the same thematic terrain as Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, the latest from Powers (Orfeo) is an impassioned but unsatisfying paean to the wonder of trees. Set primarily on the West Coast, the story revolves around nine characters, separated by age and geography, whose “lives have long been connected, deep underground.” Among these are a wheelchair-bound computer game designer; a scientist who uncovers the forest’s hidden communication systems; a psychologist studying the personality types of environmental activists; and a young woman who, after being electrocuted, hears voices urging her to save old-growth forests from logging. All are seduced by the majesty of trees and express their arboreal love in different ways: through scholarship, activism, art, and even violent resistance. Some of the prose soars, as when a redwood trunk shoots upward in a “russet, leathery apotheosis,” while some lands with a thud: “We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.” Powers’s best works are thrilling accounts of characters blossoming as they pursue their intellectual passions; here, few of the earnest figures come alive on the page. While it teems with people, information, and ideas, the novel feels curiously barren.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Richard Powers's ambitious new novel tests the limits of audiobook narration in its breadth and complexity, number of characters and storylines it embraces, and sweeping conception of the bond between humanity and nature. Suzanne Toren's performance is expressive and well paced, and she is especially effective when delivering Powers's more lyrical passages. However, as the four featured characters fight to preserve a virgin forest, Toren's character voices are uneven--sometimes a marvelous expression of situation and state of mind, other times a regrettable mimicry of gender or ethnicity. So powerful are Powers's interlocking stories that the listener is simply carried along. This is a novel that many will embrace. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
    • Good Reading Magazine
      This is possibly the most beautiful and profound book about trees that you will ever read. As the novel opens, we are introduced to a range of people who are in some way influenced by trees. There’s the man whose ancestor planted a chestnut tree in a Iowan cornfield before the American Civil War, and the soldier in Vietnam who is caught and saved by a Banyan tree as he plummets from a burning plane. There’s the daughter of a Chinese migrant who spends her youth visiting campsites in US National Parks, and an intense young girl who becomes a botanist, and changes the world’s understanding of trees through her studies. At first, the characters have a chapter each, and the novel is seemingly a series of short stories where trees are the only common factor. But later in the book, the characers’ lives connect when they come together to save the continent’s remaining stands of virgin forest from timber companies and developers. This is a magnificent and compelling novel. The characters are so different from each other that it seems each deserves a novel of their own, but a love of nature and what it might mean to lose it draws them together. But the real stars of the novel are the trees; the story explores what science is now telling us about trees as sentient, social beings and speculates as to where undiscovered cures for diseases might lie. And it compels us to be grateful for the bounty of forests we are thoughtlessly squandering, and to consider what it might be like to live without them. One of the great novels of the year for me. Reviewed by Lesley West

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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