Essential reading for anybody who cares about the future.

A seriously great book, important and urgent… As soon as I finished Our Place, I packaged up my copy and sent it off to Michael Gove… this is the kind of book that demands action.

Best known as one of our foremost nature writers, Mark Cocker spent several years researching this tour de force… stuffed with eye-opening statistics… by turns hopeful, melancholy and humorous… [Our Place] is heartfelt.

Thunderingly necessary… Cocker on this kind of form – eloquent, practical, dogged and wise – is the sort of dynamic chivvying force [conservation] will always need… the book he’s written – however measured, equable and intelligent – is a call for revolution.

Impassioned, expert and always beautifully written… Our Place is a sobering and magnificent work.

It is easy to be angry about environmental destruction; easy to demand change without hope but in this potent, elegant and influencing telling of the story of what we have done to England's wildlife, Mark Cocker archives something more: a reasoned tone in a radical cause. If you care about our country, read it.

What a relief it is to have this subject explored without the usual diatribes and righteous hysteria. Cocker’s quiet tone carries great authority and… [Our Place] deserves to command respect and wide attention.

A fierce polemic by an eminent ornithologist about Britain’s denuded natural habitat.

Fascinating… Our Place is a brave book... It will undoubtedly ruffle what few figurative feathers we have left.

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event, and [Our Place] is no exception… Cocker has always been brilliant at considering our relationship with nature… You can come away from it feeling that something can be done, that we can save Britain’s wildlife, if only there is the will to turn well-meaning generalities into action. The clock is ticking.

A superb new book by the naturalist Mark Cocker that is fast becoming highly influential… The environment secretary is telling friends he found it ‘powerfully persuasive’.

I kept thinking of the raw power of Mark Cocker’s astonishing Our Place, which was brilliant because it was so particular and familiar in the natural world it anatomised.

An artful mix of lyrical writing and assured analysis that amounts to a quiet manifesto for action.

More urgent than any of Cocker’s previous writing… This resourceful and eloquent book could prove to be important.

This is the best book on the state of nature since George Monbiot’s Feral and deserves to be read just as widely… a very good read.

Devastatingly perceptive.

This book contains some exquisite writing about nature, but it is always powerfully and insistently ground in “its cause” … A radical polemic in the tradition of Hazlitt and Cobbett

This is a clarion call to the country’

A new book by Mark Cocker is a major event and his latest is a work of sweeping ambition

Important… ambitious… [Cocker] is a superb writer

A compelling history of nature conservation and why it matters, it is worth your time

Our Place… is a work of serious and sustained advocacy – passionate and committed… elements are fused in the writing, along with many apparent digressions and asides, in a way that gives the book a richly textured feel… the argument advances on several fronts simultaneously and in more than one dimension, in a complex literary ecology matching his subject.

Mark Cocker… writes with superb understanding

A lyrical and intensely personal account… an excellent and important book… a wake-up call to us all.

Operatic … a novel devoted to “reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment”.

It can change the way you think about trees slightly, and it certainly did for me.

The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer.

This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.

A magnificent saga of lives aligned with the marvels of trees, the intricacy and bounty of forests, and their catastrophic destruction under the onslaught of humanity’s ever-increasing population … A virtuoso at parallel narratives ... gripping… Powers’ sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain; celebration of creativity and connection; and informed and expressive awe over the planet’s life force and its countless and miraculous manifestations … [A] profound and symphonic novel.

Here is a big, brave, ambitious novel… The writing is breathtaking, the message is devastating. This book will fill you with wonder.

Formidably forks through time and place as it considers how best to care for our world.

An astonishingly rich book. Rich in ideas and imagination. Rich in drama, wisdom and truly illuminating facts about trees.

There is a lot to learn from this novel.

Moby Dick for trees.

Alert to the large ideas and generous to the small ones; in an age of cramped autofictions and self-scrutinising miniatures, it blossoms.

Brilliant at the futility of human action.

A masterpiece of operatic proportions … What Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves … A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.

His masterpiece.

You will careen through this book. The prose is driven. You don’t really get to draw breath … The writing is steel-edged, laser-sharp when Richard Powers wants it to be. When he sets out to nail meaning, it’s done. There are sentences you return to and wonder at.

This walk through the woods via words is a passionate paean to the natural world that prompts us to appreciate afresh our place on the planet.

[I]t’s huge, it’s exciting, it’s wondrous … This really deserves to be read.

The Overstory is a book you learn from.

Dazzlingly written… Among the best novels I’ve read this decade… Despite its deep-time perspective, it could hardly be more of-the-moment

A beautiful novel about humans reconnecting with nature in a fascinatingly, inventive world with colourful, rich characters, it will rekindle your love for nature

An intriguing, powerful book

Absolutely blown away by this epic, heartbreaking novel about us and trees

This extraordinary novel transformed my view of nature. Never again will I pass great tree without offering a quiet but heartfelt incantation of thanks, gratitude and wonder

A sweeping novel that skilfully intertwines many different stories of trees and people to create a paean to the hidden power and vital importance of the natural world

Absorbing, thought-provoking and more than enough incentive to embrace your inner tree-hugger

The Overstory is filled with character and incident enough to engage anybody, but it's also filled with philosophy, science, poetry, and colour. It's a celebration of the world and humanity, but also tells of our coming doom. Perhaps above all it's a eulogy to trees. Eulogy is the right word because the novel celebrates the life, the beauty and wisdom of trees-but also their death. The novel also casts a cold-but loving-eye on humanity

The Overstory has the mix of science and fiction that I so love; it widens my understanding and respect for the creatures who share this planet

Stunning... It's been one of those rare books that has had a profound effect on me, and which has changed my perspective on life

Mind-boggling and visionary. The multi-stranded novel is a masterpiece in which science and poetry are deeply intertwined

A compelling read is that is near impossible to put down

The Overstory is a prescient novel that urges us to take responsibility for our actions

A masterpiece of storytelling at its very best. Powers weaves together science, poetry, nature and humanity so beautifully that it makes my heart ache and my mind fly

A wild and expansive novel, knitting together a glorious and diverse cast of characters, some of them human, some of them trees. I defy you not to be moved, and then angered about what we are doing to our planet and these glorious sentinels rooted upon it

My novel of the year was Richard Powers' masterpiece, The Overstory... it's a magnificent read

The Overstory by Richard Powers is likely the most beautiful book ever written about people and trees