The Overstory Reading Order

The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about trees, the people who love them, and the radical measures some will take to preserve them. A vast, polyphonic narrative, it begins with nine separate stories about nine people and the trees that changed their lives — a family's chestnut, an aerial photographer's redwood, a video-game designer's chestnuts, a Vietnamese-American immigrant's mulberry — before weaving them together into a collective campaign to save old-growth forest. Powers drew on decades of scientific research into tree communication and intelligence — the mycorrhizal networks (the 'wood wide web') by which trees share nutrients and signals underground — to argue that forests think, remember, and care for one another in ways humans are only beginning to understand. Structurally the novel mirrors a tree: it opens with 'Roots' (the origin stories), proceeds to 'Trunk' (where the lives converge), then 'Crown' (the widening consequences), and finally 'Seeds' (what remains). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, and was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by The New York Times in 2024.