A Sunday Times Fiction Book of the Year
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A Sunday Times Novel of the Year

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett's The Trees is a powerful satire of revenge and racial justice in America.

'He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece.' - Los Angeles Times

When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier.

As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America's violent past.

'Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.' - The New York 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, Dr. No and James. 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.

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

Reviews
The genius of this novel is that in an age of reactionary populism it goes on the offensive, using popular forms to address a deep political issue as page-turning comic horror. * The Guardian *
It's about time this extraordinary American writer got some credit this side of the Pond. * The Sunday Times *
He has made some audacious leaps over nearly 40 years of writing, but The Trees may be his most audacious. He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece. He turns narrative stakes into moral stakes and raises them sky-high. Readers will laugh until it hurts. * Los Angeles Times *
The Trees feels powerfully prescient. * The Financial Times *
'A powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restitution.' * Guardian *
'Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park.' * The Daily Telegraph *
'The novelist has regularly exploded our models of genre and identity. In The Trees, he's raising the stakes, confronting America's legacy of lynching in a mystery at once hilarious and horrifying.' * The New Yorker *
'Everett deploys goofy humour and caricature in a high stakes, high concept crime novel in which America's history of racial violence is itself the perpetrator.' * Daily Mail *



Book Information
ISBN 9781035036615
Author Percival Everett
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Picador
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Weight(grams) 254g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 141mm * 23mm