'This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived'

This is the story of a group of strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, brought together to save it from catastrophe.

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

Moving through history and across landscapes, this tree-filled novel unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the natural world.