The story unfolds in concentric circles of interlocking fables, spanning from the time before the Civil War in New York to the Timber Wars of the late twentieth century in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An airlift master from the Vietnam War is shot from the sky and falls into a banyan tree, which saves him. An artist inherits a hundred years' worth of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A party-loving student in the late 1980s electrifies herself and is sent back to life by beings of air and light. A hearing and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees communicate with one another. These and five other strangers, each called by trees in different ways, come together in a final and violent struggle to save the few remaining acres of untouched forest on the continent. There is a world beside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, imaginative, and wonderfully inventive.