The Overstory

The Overstory is a novel by the American writer Richard Powers, published in 2018 by W. W. Norton and Company. It is about nine people whose lives have been shaped by trees, and about what brings them together.

The book is not built around one character. It begins with separate accounts of the nine, some of them going back generations, and the structure is deliberately non-linear. The thing they have in common is a relationship with trees that they did not choose and cannot ignore.

What they come to do is work against the destruction of forests, and the later part of the novel follows the environmental activism that some of them take up. Powers has said that Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, helped to shape the book, and that he took from it a sense of plants as creatures with a kind of intelligence.

It was a New York Times bestseller and won several major literary awards, and it is one of the novels that has been most widely read on the subject of the natural world.