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

Opinion

Editorial

Ties with Tehran
Updated 24 Apr, 2024

Ties with Tehran

Tomorrow, if ties between Washington and Beijing nosedive, and the US asks Pakistan to reconsider CPEC, will we comply?
Working together
24 Apr, 2024

Working together

PAKISTAN’S democracy seems adrift, and no one understands this better than our politicians. The system has gone...
Farmers’ anxiety
24 Apr, 2024

Farmers’ anxiety

WHEAT prices in Punjab have plummeted far below the minimum support price owing to a bumper harvest, reckless...
By-election trends
Updated 23 Apr, 2024

By-election trends

Unless the culture of violence and rigging is rooted out, the credibility of the electoral process in Pakistan will continue to remain under a cloud.
Privatising PIA
23 Apr, 2024

Privatising PIA

FINANCE Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb’s reaffirmation that the process of disinvestment of the loss-making national...
Suffering in captivity
23 Apr, 2024

Suffering in captivity

YET another animal — a lioness — is critically ill at the Karachi Zoo. The feline, emaciated and barely able to...