Synopsis
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.
Details
05 October 2023
9781035036615Reviews
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.
‘Satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park.’
It's about time this extraordinary American writer got some credit this side of the Pond.
‘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.’
