The Overstory Reading Order

Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) is the great American tree novel — nine characters whose lives converge through their relationships with trees, from a chestnut tree that survives American blight and photographs its own changes across a century to the activists who chain themselves to a California redwood to prevent its logging. Powers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 and the novel is the most celebrated environmental novel in American literature since Desert Solitaire. It is also an unusual structural achievement — eight separate stories told in the first section, converging in the third, with a final dispersal — that most readers find both challenging and deeply moving.