The Overstory Audiobook

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review). The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. 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 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. 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.

Download and start listening now!

"The Overstory is composed as vignettes that start out with different protagonists, but which soon start to intertwine like the roots of a single organism. We are encouraged to revere the importance of trees in American history, the role of forests as not just a place for recreation or a producer of natural resources, but ultimately, as a powerful metaphor for the interconnectedness of life as we know it--or as is more often the case--for the incredible complexity of life that we still do not understand. Listeners are compelled to see the value of trees in a new light through Powers' fictional re-telling of the late 20th Century environmental movement. The fight over the fabled and fated forest giants of the Pacific Northwest is contextualized with powerful personal experiences, and it delivers enough variety and verisimilitude that you will wholeheartedly believe the characters are on the right side of history, even if they aren't sure of it themselves. The narration was a little slow-paced, but by the end of this rich journey through the spiritual, theoretical, metaphysical, cultural, and literal overstory of North America's woodlands, you will be able to see the forest for the trees, perhaps as never before."

— Marty (4 out of 5 stars)