The Trees
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Published on 5. October 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
352 pages
978-1-0350-3661-5 (ISBN)
Description
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
'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.
'Page-turning comic horror' - The Guardian
'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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * 'Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park.' * The Daily Telegraph * It's about time this extraordinary American writer got some credit this side of the Pond. * The Sunday Times * '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 * 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 * '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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pan Macmillan
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 195 mm
Width: 130 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
254 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-0350-3661-5 (9781035036615)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
08/2023
Picador
€14.49
Available for download
Person
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.
Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.