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
‘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.