28 January 2026

This is a book that quietly rearranges how you see the tree outside your own window, and I don't say that lightly. Powers follows nine human characters whose lives, in wildly different ways, get pulled toward trees and forests, and slowly those separate threads braid into something much larger than any one of their individual stories. It's ambitious in scope and unhurried in pace, so this isn't a book to rush — read it when you have room to let your sense of time stretch out a little, the way the trees in it operate on a scale most of us never think about day to day. If you're looking for a book about nature and connection that isn't sentimental, this delivers real awe instead of easy comfort; some chapters read almost like environmental thrillers, others like quiet elegies. I'd recommend this to readers who love learning something alongside their fiction, since Powers folds in real botanical science and activism history without it ever feeling like a lecture. It's also a strangely hopeful read, even amid its anger, because it insists that seeing differently is itself a kind of action worth taking. Pick this up outdoors if you can, somewhere with actual trees nearby — it genuinely changes the experience. Give yourself patience with the character sections early on; they can feel disconnected at first, but the payoff, once the threads finally converge, is one of the most rewarding structural payoffs in contemporary fiction.