It is rare that a book can change one’s perspective on life and living. This is one of those gems.
How I experience being in a forest, observing each and every tree, from the roots to the trunk to the crown, is now different. My appreciation of all the things in my house that are made from wood is now different.
The Overstory is a stunning ode to the natural world, woven in with impassioned activism and the tangled personal lives and goals of 9 strangers, each summoned in different ways by the trees. Powers repositions us as humans - "This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived."
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
I love a fairytale. I love an unusual kind of romance. And I love books about trees. Eucalyptus ticked all these boxes, in fact it was such a good book that I read it twice.
On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land. When Ellen is nineteen her father announces his decision: she will marry the man who can name all his species of eucalyptus, down to the last tree.
Hovering between fantastical and realistic, this book is an elegant, witty, and mesmerizing journey of love and eucalypti, a tree that grows in abundant variety in Australia.
'A masterpiece. A novel of high seriousness and higher playfulness' Michael Hulse, Spectator
On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the eucalypts, down to the last tree.
As suitors clamber to meet Holland's challenge, Ellen encounters a strange young man among her father's trees - a storyteller, with enchanting tales of faraway lands.
'Murray Bail is the warmest and quick-witted of storytellers. You will never…
I am so grateful that my book club chooses one Australian classic each year – otherwise I may not have found this remarkable piece of writing by a 22 year old Randolph Stow.
To The Islands is a Lear-like journey in the strange country of one man's soul. Set in a remote part of Australia's north-west, the novel tracks the last days of a worn-out Anglican missionary, weaving between the landscape and his mind as he searches for the islands of death and mystery.
Written back in the 1950s, against a background of black-white fear and violence, it is a work of mesmerizing power. Its compassionate message is as potent and relevant today as it was back then.
A novel which won the 1958 Miles Franklin and Melbourne Book Fair Awards. It is the story of an old missionary whose faith has deserted him and who, after a crisis at the mission, sets out on a journey of self-discovery through landscape as desolate as the state of his soul.
This book offers story medicine for children, families, and communities at times of grieving, loss, and separation. Stories and words have therapeutic potential. They can strengthen us, help to reframe things, and help make meaning.
Included are 94 stories for the loss of a loved one; the loss of family connection e.g. separation, divorce, adoption, foster children; the loss of a pet; separation from home, country, or place; and the loss of health and well-being. The last section includes tales for the loss of nature and ecogrief, helping to encourage ‘active hope’; and stories on cycles of life and change. As well as many original stories from Susan, there are stories from different countries and cultures by writers from a diversity of professions and backgrounds.
