Bella's Share: The Overstory

From Bella: This novel genuinely opened a door for me to a different way of looking at our world and human beings' place in it. I underlined and saved countless sentences and passages because the writing is so beautiful. Quite simply, everyone should read it.

The Overstory follows nine strangers (an artist, a scientist, a soldier, an activist, etc.) whose lives are transformed by trees, and whose stories are gradually pulled together, toward a common reckoning with what humanity is doing to the natural world.

One of the book’s most arresting stories is about a tree researcher (inspired by the scientist Suzanne Simard and her real work) who discovers that trees communicate with each other and prioritise community, collaboration, and giving.  Powers contrasts this with the self-serving, consumption-driven behaviours in human systems. That inversion, the fact that trees might be in some respects more sophisticated social beings, is the kind of thought that lodges somewhere and won’t shift.

What moved me just as much as the story itself was discovering that Richard Powers exists — that someone with his gift for story telling decided to tell this story, spent presumably years bringing it to life, and that thousands of people have now read it.