Richard Powers

You might say that Richard Powers is branching out, said

in SierraClub .org. With his sweeping new novel, The Overstory, the National Book Award– winning author of The Echo Maker has found a way to cast trees as central characters. “Trees are every bit as social as we are,” he says; they also have their own wants and needs. Powers initially aspired to create a novel that pushed all human characters into secondary roles, but he eventually chose to focus on nine individuals who separately come to appreciate that every tree is a creature with a will, a memory, communal ties, and the ability to adapt to conditions and communicate with others. “I tried,” he says, “to tell a story that changes a reader’s capacity to identify with these magnificent living things.”

Quite a few arboreal heroes enjoy moments in the spotlight, said in BookPage. There’s the ancient coastal redwood whose branches become a human couple’s home. In Vietnam, a 300-year-old banyan saves a U.S. Air Force sergeant when he falls from a cargo plane. The main human characters, meanwhile, struggle to persuade other people to see trees as they should be seen, and Powers doesn’t mind if his novel is labeled didactic. “I happen to believe that we humans are deeply, dangerously deranged, and that only a profound shift in consciousness will keep us viable in this place,” he says. “The stories that will do us some good, this late in the day, are the ones that can direct our attention, for a moment, to all the astonishment that isn’t us.”