The Overstory

"Winner"

"Shortlist"

"This is the novel whose theme is clearly our relation to the natural environment, in particular to trees as an element of the natural environment. It’s also a book by someone who clearly loves trees. He loves woods and forests, and trees in cities, and every conceivable kind of tree. He knows a great deal about them, but as you receive that information, you never feel like he found a fact and thought to himself, ‘Oh, I learned this, I can put it in my book.’ What it feels like at the beginning is a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. They’re all brought together in a marriage which in the end involves a crime and its consequences. The novel’s main sense is that you’re drawn to thinking that trees are wonderful, and we’re doing terrible things to them (and should pull back). As I said with regard to Kushner’s novel, novels that make you think about issues of public policy don’t work to achieve the effect of making you care if they feel didactic, manipulative or hectoring. And this one doesn’t either. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees. “You’d be a strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees” You’ve also become engaged with a fantastically rich dramatis personae . There are so many characters in this novel, so many worlds. There are people who start out in China and so on, though the main activity goes on in the United States. It’s beautifully written. He’s a well-established writer, and everybody knows he can write. Like all of these books, it’s very distinctive. In some of the other books, sometimes there’s a spareness of language in certain moments—this is not like that. This is rich language. It’s also very long. You have to set aside time to read it. When we discussed the longlist with the press, we observed that we felt some of the novels had not been well served by their editors. People took us to be complaining about length—but that’s really not at all what we had in mind. A long book can be exactly the right length. (And this book is exactly the right length, even though it’s very long.) None of the books that we put on the final list was longer or shorter than it should have been. We are commending to people to read this very long book about trees, but again, there’s an exciting plot, eventually. These were the novels we thought were the best, but there were a lot of those. It wasn’t just a reflection of our taste—which it could have been. Many books were well-crafted; they had interesting characters; they had plots that made you want to keep reading and language you just wanted to savour. But they were also making you think about deep questions, often questions of the moment. There were quite a lot of dystopian novels in the 170: novels worried about what we were doing to the planet, about what we were doing to society, about inequality. Novels that address questions of racial division or questions of gender inequality and sexual harassment. It wasn’t just us picking novels that had messages, as it were. And as I say, having a message by itself can be annoying and tiresome."

"Yes, this novel is a bit like a blockbuster movie where you don’t want to know what’s going to happen. This probably should have a spoiler alert. It wasn’t spoiled for me, because I hadn’t read about it beforehand. So I had the experience of having the revelation that the author clearly hoped a reader would have, which is that what appears to be a book about distinct individuals—almost a book of short stories— turns out to be something more complex, in which all the characters are linked through time and space. And the real payoff is that the lives of people in this story are used metaphorically to explore something surprising and fascinating, which is that living trees are not distinct individuals, but exist in an ecosystem in which they communicate directly with each other. That sounds a bit airy-fairy, but he’s actually drawing on interesting empirical research. One of his main characters, Patricia Westerford, is a scientist whose work on the chemical signalling that trees do via their roots is based on that of two real scientists, Diana Beresford-Kroeger and Suzanne Simard. Going back to this question of form, the important thing is that Powers pulls it off. You could come up with a clever, academic exercise of how to write a novel that ‘speaks for the trees’ that would be a disaster to read. Power’s skill as a writer was good enough to carry me along. For me, the revelatory part of it was important because I didn’t see it coming. Then, when it did come, it had earned its power, through the cumulative force of the individual stories. I didn’t find them all equally compelling, but, for the most part, they were compelling enough that I suspended any disbelief and trusted in the narrative. There’s something quite activist in the writing. Powers is making quite an explicit case for caring about nature. I admire it because it’s a high-stakes game. When it’s done in a heavy-handed way, it can feel very sentimental and maudlin, but for me, this novel worked."

"I'll nominate This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein, and The Overstory, by Richard Powers, in two different categories of greatness."

"taking the long view: a poetic view of human generations and activity measured in tree-time. The writing is beautiful and often heartbreaking."

"I've been waiting for a good long stretch of days to dive into the world of it without interruption."

"I read it too quickly a few months ago and want to see again, more closely and with greater attention, how he works his magic."

"The last truly great book I read was "The Overstory," by Richard Powers."

"I am still reeling from "The Overstory," by Richard Powers."

"The Overstory, by Richard Powers."

""The Overstory," by Richard Powers. I'll never see a tree the same way again."

"The Overstory, by Richard Powers, is a book that, the further I am from reading it, looms larger and larger in my imagination."

""The Overstory," by Richard Powers. It's a wonderful example of how great storytelling can help build understanding and empathy. Original and profound."

""The Overstory," by Richard Powers. He's brilliant."