The Overstory

Shortlisted for, and favourite to win, the 2018 Man Booker prize, The Overstory stands apart from most other contemporary novels.

Culture watching Sarah Allen

The first surprise is that it doesn’t centre around people and their problems; the second that it is fundamentally evangelistic. By that I don’t mean that it is a Christian book (far from it, in fact), rather that it aims to convict readers and change their thinking and lives. The message that it proclaims on every page is that trees are complex ‘social beings with memory and agency’, which deserve our reverence.