The Trees

A Sunday Times Fiction Book of the Year
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A Sunday Times Novel of the Year

Shortlisted 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 Times

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, 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.

‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’ - The New York Times