The Trees

A violent history refuses to be buried in Percival Everett’s striking novel, which combines an unnerving murder mystery with a powerful condemnation of racism and police violence.

Something strange is afoot in Money, Mississippi. A series of brutal murders are eerily linked by the presence at each crime scene of a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.  The investigating detectives soon discover that uncannily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor, who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years…

"With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humour and razor blade sharp insight The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: Hard to put down and impossible to forget."  -  Carole V. Bell, NPR

"Eerie, provocative, blackly comic Southern noir. A page-turner with a sharp, provocative edge, as it harks back to the real-life murder of the young Emmett Till, it has important things to say about race."  -  The 2022 Booker Prize Judges

Percival Everett is the author of over 30 books since his debut, Suder, was released in 1983.  His modern classics include I Am Not Sidney Poitier, So Much Blue, Erasure and Glyph. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at The University of Southern California. Everett was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 with his novel Telephone. He received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2022.