The Overstory

Richard Powers 2018

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
literary fiction philosophical loss survival

Our Take

Powers writes nine human stories in service of a single argument: trees are dying and we are not listening. The novel's structure mirrors its subject — deep time, interconnected root systems, the inadequacy of individual human lives against geological change. You finish it and look at every tree differently, knowing it is already a ruin.

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