Diverse The Overstory Roman von Richard Powers, Pulitzer-Preisträger 2019

The Overstory: A Novel

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. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, 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, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. 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. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There's something you need to hear."

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. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, 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, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. 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. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There's something you need to hear."

Die Geschichte entfaltet sich in konzentrischen Ringen ineinandergreifender Fabeln, die von der Zeit vor dem Bürgerkrieg in New York bis zu den Timber Wars des späten zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts im pazifischen Nordwesten und darüber hinaus reichen. Ein Lastenmeister der Luftwaffe im Vietnamkrieg wird aus dem Himmel geschossen und fällt in einen Banyanbaum, der ihn rettet. Ein Künstler erbt hundert Jahre fotografische Porträts, alle von der gleichen zum Scheitern verurteilten amerikanischen Kastanie. Eine feierwütige Studentin in den späten 1980er Jahren elektrisiert sich selbst und wird von Wesen aus Luft und Licht ins Leben zurückgeschickt. Ein hör- und sprachbehinderter Wissenschaftler entdeckt, dass Bäume miteinander kommunizieren. Diese und fünf andere Fremde, die auf unterschiedliche Weise von Bäumen gerufen werden, kommen in einem letzten und gewaltsamen Kampf zusammen, um die wenigen verbleibenden Hektar unberührten Waldes des Kontinents zu retten. Es gibt eine Welt neben unserer - riesig, langsam, miteinander verbunden, einfallsreich und grossartig erfinderisch.