‘The Overstory’ is our November book club pick

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We’re excited to announce our November pick for “Now Read This,” our book club in partnership with The New York Times. It’s Richard Powers’ “The Overstory,” a novel about trees, activism, and our connection to the natural world.

“The Overstory” was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In the book, Powers, the author of a dozen works of fiction, follows a diverse set of characters throughout time and place, all of whom eventually intertwine because of their relationships to trees and efforts to address their destruction.

In a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review, author Barbara Kingsolver writes that “The Overstory” is “a delightfully choreographed, ultimately breathtaking hoodwink” that seems to be a book about people but is actually about trees — and reimagining how we relate to them.

As Powers writes in the book: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

At the end of November, Richard Powers will join us on the PBS NewsHour to answer reader questions about “The Overstory.” We hope you’ll join us and read along.