'[Percival Everett's] books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking . . . sad, affecting and marvelous' New York Times

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Telephone is an astonishing story of love, loss and grief from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (now an Oscar-nominated film).

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in an incredibly niche field, he spends his days playing chess with his daughter, trading puns with his wife as she does yoga, and dodging committee work at the college where he teaches.

After his daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness, Wells finds a cryptic plea for help tucked into a secondhand jacket bought online. Desperately seeking a way avoid his newfound sense of powerlessness, he embarks for New Mexico on a quixotic rescue mission.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

An astonishing novel of loss and grief from 'one of our culture's preeminent novelists' (Los Angeles Times)

About the Author

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees and Dr. No. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Reviews
Achingly beautiful prose * Los Angeles Times *
[Percival Everett's] books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking . . . truly exceptional and memorable. . . sad, affecting and marvelous. * New York Times *
God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics * The Wall Street Journal *
A spellbinding, heartbreaking tale * Publishers Weekly *



Book Information
ISBN 9781035036585
Author Percival Everett
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 176g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 17mm