The Overstory by Richard Powers
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, The Overstory is a rich and deeply moving epic. The novel follows the lives of nine people whose life experiences with trees bring them together to try and stop the devastation of our forests. The characters are introduced in separate chapters and you begin to wonder how they are connected. But slowly the author unfolds their interconnections into a mesmerizing, beautifully written novel with environmental activism at its heart.
This is not a book to be read quickly but rather to be savored slowly with the beautiful, almost poetic writing of Richard Powers. It is not necessarily an easy read either. I found myself re-reading many passages that were so thought-provoking. This book is great fiction that was so educational and increased my understanding of the science of trees and challenged me to rethink some of my basic beliefs and experiences.
This is one of those books that once you finish it, you want to re-read it for more layers of understanding. I will never look at a tree the same way again.
During the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990's, a cellist plays in the street at 4:00 pm everyday for 22 days to commemorate the lives of 22 people killed in a mortar shell blast.
On one level, this is a saga about three generations of families told largely through the eyes of grandmothers, mothers, and children as they migrate or marry and assimilate into Zambia from 1903 to the near future with each chapter focusing on a single member of the family.
Charming, heartwarming and heartbreaking. Eleanor is a classic “socially awkward” young woman, rigid and very much a self-proclaimed “loner.” Not initially the kind of character that one would call endearing. Set in her ways, she works during the week, calls her highly critical mother every Wednesday night and drinks vodka alone on the weekends. When she and Raymond, the new IT employee at the office come to the rescue of an elderly man, Eleanor’s carefully ordered life suddenly starts to change.
Vast in scope, the book is a saga about four generations of a poverty-stricken Korean family that are essentially forced to live in Japan in exile. Ethnic tensions exist between the Japanese and Koreans due to Japan's colonial rule over Korea and this tension of prejudice and racisim pervades the entire story. 
