The Overstory by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2019. I came across it on a list of the 30 best non-fiction books of the last 30 years (Archive.today link). It was long (502 pages). I finished it and liked it very much, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.
You can read more about the book and the plot here. In short, it follows the lives of several people who are unrelated at first, but whose lives become linked and impacted by trees. Each of them, in their own ways, can sense what trees have been trying to tell us humans, how we are all connected, how beautiful and miraculous trees are, and how truly dumb humankind is for largely ignoring them.
I can’t do it justice except to say that the illuminates the truths of trees so vivid that much of the book feels like science fiction. It’s unbelievable how much scientific detail is in the book’s pages, and how much we don’t yet know. I can’t imagine what the process of writing it must have been like, but I found the following quote from Richard about writing the book that sheds some light:
Writing The Overstory quite literally changed my life, starting with where and how I live. Researching the book, I visited the Smokies, home to the largest tracts of remaining old growth forest east of the Rockies, with six kinds of forest and more species of trees than there are in all of Europe. I ended up staying, and I’ve lived for the last two years in this, one of the last refuges of biodiversity on the continent. Here, walking a trail has become as important to me as writing.
It’s a great book, a great story, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
“…what do all good stories do? […] “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
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