The Overstory – 9781804951781

THE MILLION-COPY GLOBAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION’Radical and exciting’ Jessie Burton’Breathtaking’ Barbara Kingsolver’It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it’ Barack Obama’Really, just one of the best novels, period’ Ann PatchettA wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. 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. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.