The Trees

Description

Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried.

In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

Awards

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022

Reviews

 'Gruesome, spooky, hysterical and unapologetic-an absolute tour de force by a writer who needs to be heard.' * ABC *

'Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.'

* New York Times Book Review *

'[The Trees] blends Everett's wit with elegy and solemnity.'

* Boston Globe *

'With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor-blade-sharp insight, The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: hard to put down and impossible to forget.'

* NPR *

'The Trees is a wild book: a gory pulp revenge fantasy and a detective narrative...[It] is just as blood-soaked and just as hilarious as Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, but it comes with more authentic historical weight for being set in a dreamlike counterpresent.'

* Bookforum *
'Based in real history...Everett's motivation for writing the novel becomes clear [as] a reminder that America's history isn't just history [and] ridicules the idea that America can be separated from its history of racism...Very punchy, very funny.' * RNZ: Nine to Noon *
'This book is explosive in every way! An absurdist play on murder mystery and ghost stories where the crime scene is history itself, the story culminates in a modern day reckoning with America's racist past and present. The surprise is that it is also laugh-out-loud funny.' * Dua Lipa *
'Percival Everett approaches genre like a veteran card shark does poker: methodically patient, rarely playing the same hand twice. His books-30 and counting-are full of ambition and mystery, each one of them sustained by a sense of existential wonder.' * Wired *
'The Trees is a strange genre mash but one with a serious and disturbing point to make...While the narrative is often wild, irreverent and comical, Everett pauses to remember [lynching victims] and the places where they suffered...Often laugh out loud funny, [and] also deeply contemplative and powerful.' * Pile by the Bed *
'This mordantly funny, twisted police procedural is both knockabout and deadly serious; a Booker-shortlisted page-turner that aims to make its reader stop short...Taking direct aim at America's collective amnesia, this scabrous, rumbustious satire should appeal to fans of Carl Hiaasen and Colson Whitehead, but is boldly original.' * Sunday Times *
'[The Trees] is such a sharp book you could cut yourself on it. Violent, funny and smart.' * Fairfield Books *
'Everett does not pull punches...Novels such as [The Trees] are vital. Shining a light, raising awareness, revealing the darkness of the past...A brilliant novel with a powerful message.' * Good Reading *
'Radical invention characterises Percival Everett's devastatingly absurdist The Trees...It weaponises the genres of horror, comedy and detective fiction to lay open the history of lynching.' * Guardian (UK) *
'Incredible...A very clever book that I could not put down!' * Readings *
'A bitingly funny, boldly satirical, deadly serious tale of racism and the legacy of injustice.' * Economist *
'Deftly combining humour and horror, [The Trees] by LA author Percival Everett offers a page-turner of a story alongside a thought-provoking satire about racism, past and present.' * West Australian *
'Excellent.' * SA Weekend *

 

 

Prizes: Winner of Fiction, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2022 (United States) and Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2022 (UK) and L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize 2022 (United States). Short-listed for Booker Prize 2022 (UK) and Dublin Literary Award 2023 (Ireland).

Author Biography: Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books. His novel Telephone was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.