The Overstory, a complex environmental novel by Richard Powers, is the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The author’s previous 11 books are explorations of complex scientific issues — such as genetics, pharmaceuticals and artificial intelligence — in a fictional context.

The novel follows nine characters across centuries who owe their very lives, in one way or another, to trees. These include a video-game creator, an amateur actress, a soldier, a lawyer and an innovative botanist who proposes a theory that trees are social creatures capable of communicating and interacting with each other and the environment. Brought together by their mutual ambition to stop deforestation, theirs is a last and violent stand to save the saviours of human life

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 21st, 2019