Description

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

Publisher 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. * 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 *