*WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION*Ī wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.

If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. 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. There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, 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, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. 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. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

The overstory