The Trees
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of James
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4.1 • 59 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Everett's sharp latest (after Telephone) spins a puckish revenge fantasy into dark social satire underpinned by a whodunit. In the archetypal Southern town of Money, Miss., someone is knocking off white men, most with a history of racist views. The first victim is Junior Junior Milam, his skull bashed in and his pants pulled down. Near Junior Junior's corpse is another, the body of an unidentified Black man. The mystery intensifies with the appearance of more racist white victims, each with a Black corpse laid beside them. Deepening and complicating the story: the Black corpses all disappear, and are replaced by photographs of Emmett Till. The novel unfolds over a hundred super-short chapters, allowing Everett to maintain a breakneck pace as the crime spree spreads north, the FBI becomes involved, and the president weighs in with a painfully tone-deaf address. Everett delves into a miasma of racist stereotypes held toward and among multiple groups, sometimes with the same sophomoric humor applied to characters' loopy names. (A pair of Asian detectives are named Chin and Ho, a reference to a character from Hawaii Five-O; Kyle-Lindsay Beet is the High Grand Serpent of the Revived Brotherhood of White Protectors.) Still, this timely absurdist novel produces plenty of chills.
Customer Reviews
Remarkable books
Percival Everett writes remarkable books. James, which I read a few months ago, is a masterpiece, not just in my opinion. Erasure, made into a film entitled American Fiction, is another.
Now I’ve read The Trees - is it a whodunit thriller, a black comedy or a social history? Well, it’s all of those and more. Ever get the feeling you’re being had? As this book so nimbly demonstrates, politically we are, for sure. An astonishingly powerful book.
A page turner
Keeps you gripped, makes you laugh and keeps you guessing.