The Trees

A Sunday Times Fiction Book of the YearWinner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic FictionA Sunday Times Novel of the YearShortlisted 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 TimesWhen 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. From the author of James, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. ‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’ – The New York Times