The Trees: A Novel [Paperback]

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author ofTelephone

Percival EverettsThe Treesis a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader cant look away.The Treesis an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on Americas pulse.

Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.The New York Times Book Review

[The Trees] blends Everetts wit with elegy and solemnity.The Boston Globe

With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor blade sharp insight The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: Hard to put down and impossible to l)