"An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. The story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe"--