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
‘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 novel James in paperback now.
Details
24 August 2023
9781035036622Reviews
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.
