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The Overstory

10 best books like The Overstory (Richard Powers): The Underground Railroad, Washington Black, Animals Strike Curious Poses, Eternal Life, Early Work, Everything Under, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories, Milkman

The Underground Railroad
AuthorColson Whitehead
ISBN0385542364
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad,...
Washington Black
AuthorEsi Edugyan
ISBN0525521429
Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born.

When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch,"...
Animals Strike Curious Poses
AuthorElena Passarello
ISBN1941411398
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful,...
Eternal Life
AuthorDara Horn
ISBN0393356566
Rachel is a woman with a problem: she can’t die. Her recent troubles—widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son—are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, and hundreds of children. In the 2,000 years since she made a spiritual bargain...
Early Work
AuthorAndrew Martin
ISBN0374146128
A wry, supersmart, seriocomic first novel from a prodigious talent—a Sentimental Education for our time

For young writers of a certain temperament—if they haven’t had such notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet—the delusion persists that great writing must...
Everything Under
AuthorDaisy Johnson
An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen

The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking...
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
AuthorRobin Wall Kimmerer
ISBN0870714996
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.Robin Wall Kimmerer's...
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
AuthorEllen Meloy
Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest....
Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories
AuthorDeborah Eisenberg
ISBN0062864688
6 Hours and 55 Minutes

A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form, performed by a remarkable cast: Deborah Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Josh Hamilton, and Wallace Shawn.

At times raucously hilarious,...
Milkman
AuthorAnna Burns
ISBN0571338763
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start...
In Our Mad and Furious City
AuthorGuy Gunaratne
ISBN1472250192
For Selvon, Ardan, and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music, and freedom, but now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe. While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan...
The Maze at Windermere
AuthorGregory Blake Smith
ISBN0735221928
A richly layered novel of love, ambition, and duplicity, set against the storied seascape of Newport, Rhode Island

A reckless wager between a tennis pro with a fading career and a drunken party guest--the stakes are an antique motorcycle and an heiress's diamond necklace--launches a narrative...
The Friend
AuthorSigrid Nunez
ISBN0735219451
A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute...
Happiness
AuthorAminatta Forna
London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide--Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. From this chance encounter, Aminatta Forna's unerring powers of observation...
The Many
AuthorWyl Menmuir
ISBN1784630489
On the surface, his move to the isolated village on the coast makes perfect sense. But the experience is an increasingly unsettling one for Timothy Bucchanan. A dead man no one will discuss. Wasted fish hauled from a contaminated sea. The dream of faceless men. Questions that lead to further questions....
West
AuthorCarys Davies
ISBN1501179349
When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond...
Last Stories
AuthorWilliam Trevor
With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor was regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the admired master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered stories that illuminate the human condition which will surely...
Crossing Open Ground
AuthorBarry Lopez
ISBN0679721835
As an collection of journalistic pieces and essays, Crossing Open Ground is slightly less consistent in its overwhelming awe than Lopez' other works. His earlier, more explicitly journalistic pieces seem less impressive than the later works, which tend to be the ones that spend more time drawing...
The Long Take
AuthorRobin Robertson
ISBN1509846883
Walker, a young Canadian recently demobilised after war and his active service in the Normandy landings and subsequent European operations. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and unable to face a return to his family home in rural Nova Scotia, he goes in search of freedom, change, anonymity...
Where the Dog Star Never Glows
AuthorTara Lynn Masih
ISBN0982576056
In this impressive debut collection, Tara Masih shows an intimate sense of understanding her characters' innermost feelings, creating a memorable map of diverse characters that span the globe and several eras. Ghosts dance, butterflies swarm, men crystallize, the sun disappears, and water plays...
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
AuthorElizabeth Rush
ISBN1571313672
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD
A CHICAGO TRIBUNE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2018
A GUARDIAN, NPR's SCIENCE FRIDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018

Hailed as "deeply felt" (New York Times), "a revelation" (Pacific Standard), and "the book on climate change...
The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
AuthorDavid George Haskell
"Here is a book to nourish the spirit. The Songs of Trees is a powerful argument against the ways in which humankind has severed the very biological networks that give us our place in the world. Listen as David Haskell takes his stethoscope to the heart of nature - and discover the poetry and music contained...
The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers
AuthorAdam Nicolson
ISBN1250134188
Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land."

A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall,...
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
AuthorEric Rutkow
ISBN1439193541
In the bestselling tradition of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, this fascinating and unique historical work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells...
In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World
AuthorLauren E. Oakes
The award-winning and surprisingly hopeful story of one woman's search for resiliency in a warming world

Several years ago, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes set out from California for Alaska's old-growth forests to hunt for a dying tree: the yellow-cedar. With climate change as the culprit, the...
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