The Trees

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 and Booker prize-shortlisted novel James.

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. An instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller in hardback, James was a finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and was named the Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles.