A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most 'prodigiously talented' (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.
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. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.
A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. 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.
There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us.
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.