The Overstory
Richard Powers (2018)
“Nine strangers are pulled into the fate of the world's last forests — a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that makes trees the protagonists of human history.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
The Hidden Life of Trees
Peter Wohlleben
The popular science book that shares much of Powers's source material — a companion text that shows what the novel dramatizes
Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard
The memoir of the real scientist whose research Powers fictionalized in Patricia Westerford — essential context for understanding what the novel claimed and whether it was right
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Structurally related — both novels use linked character strands to build an argument that no single strand could carry alone
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
The other great American novel organized around the relationship between humans and a non-human intelligence — both are simultaneously ecological documents and metaphysical arguments
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Another novel that uses fiction to make an argument about human civilization and ecological limits — Le Guin is Powers's most direct literary ancestor in using science fiction and literary fiction to do philosophical work
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Shares the quality of deep attention to a specific landscape and a specific life — Robinson and Powers are both novelists of sustained observation, though Robinson's attention is theological where Powers's is biological