Recommendations
Books Like The Overstory
Best books to read after The Overstory by Richard Powers
Richard Powers's The Overstory is the Pulitzer Prize-winning ecological novel — nine stories converging through trees. These recommendations continue the Powers canon, explore the environmental novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the multi-strand American novel about what we are doing to the natural world.
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Buy on AmazonBewilderment
by Richard Powers
The companion Powers novel — a widowed astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son, a Booker shortlist novel continuing The Overstory's concerns about consciousness and ecological collapse.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Gold Bug Variations
by Richard Powers
The earlier Powers — a double helix of narrative interweaving Bach's Goldberg Variations and the discovery of the genetic code, showing Powers's characteristic range and formal ambition earlier in his career.
- 3
Buy on AmazonA Sand County Almanac
by Aldo Leopold
The environmental nonfiction companion — Leopold's month-by-month account of a Wisconsin sand county farm, the foundational text of American environmental ethics that The Overstory explicitly engages with.
- 4
Buy on AmazonBraiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Indigenous botanical nonfiction companion — Kimmerer's essays on plants and the Indigenous scientific tradition, the non-fiction equivalent of what The Overstory is doing in fiction: recovering attention to the plant world.
- 5
Buy on AmazonDesert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey
The American environmental classic — Abbey's seasons as a ranger in Arches National Monument, the most celebrated American environmental writing before The Overstory and one of the books that shaped the tradition Powers is writing in.
- 6Buy on Amazon
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The ecological catastrophe companion — a father and son in a post-apocalyptic landscape stripped of all life, McCarthy's novel showing what the world The Overstory is trying to prevent would look like.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Hidden Life of Trees
by Peter Wohlleben
The tree science nonfiction companion — Wohlleben's account of how trees communicate, support each other, and form communities through root networks and fungal highways, the popular science book that Powers draws on in The Overstory.
- 8
Buy on AmazonWalden
by Henry David Thoreau
The American environmental classic that preceded all the others — Thoreau's two years in a cabin at Walden Pond, the origin of the American tradition of paying close attention to the non-human world that The Overstory is the latest chapter of.
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