The Overstory

The Overstory opens as nine separate portraits. An artist inherits a century of photographs of a single chestnut tree. A scientist discovers that forests communicate underground. A Vietnam veteran is saved by a banyan. A property lawyer, a coder building a world inside a game, a college student struck by lightning, and others each have a turning point rooted in trees. Powers grows these strands apart through the long first section, then braids them together as several characters converge on a campaign of forest activism in the Pacific Northwest. The novel spans roughly a century and asks what humans owe to organisms that outlive them.