The Trees

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Percival Everett's The Trees is a powerful satire of revenge and racial justice in America. ‘Page-turning comic horror’ – The Guardian ‘Powerfully prescient’ – The Financial Times ‘Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park’ – The Daily Telegraph ‘Hilarious and horrifying’ – The New Yorker 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. They're greeted 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 . . . Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning and Booker prize-shortlisted novel James.

About the Author :
Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Booker Prize-shortlisted James, Zulus, Erasure (adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction), 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. Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Review :
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. It's about time this extraordinary American writer got some credit this side of the Pond. 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. The Trees feels powerfully prescient. ‘A powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restitution.’ ‘Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park.’ ‘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.’ ‘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.’