The Trees: A Novel
About this product
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 of Telephone
Percival Everett’s The Trees is 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 can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse. Read more
Editor's Take
Review coverage for The Trees: A Novel by Percival Everett is strongly positive overall, with critics and readers praising its mix of dark humor, satire, horror, and historical seriousness. Goodreads reviewers describe it as a fast-paced, genre-bending novel with thousands of reader ratings and many enthusiastic comments. Amazon-style consumer sentiment is echoed in broader book-review coverage, which says the book is funny, provocative, and hard to categorize. Review sources such as NPR, The Guardian, Book Marks, and BookBrowse highlight its sharp treatment of racism and police violence, along with its inventive, unsettling storytelling. Several reviews call it a page-turner, a revenge fantasy, and a powerful literary thriller. I did not find a verified real YouTube watch URL in the gathered results, so no video IDs are included.
Price History
Specifications
| Genre | Fiction |
| Illustrated | No |
Product Details
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date | September 21, 2021 |
| Language | English |
| Print length | 288 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 164445064X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1644450642 |
| Item Weight | 2.31 pounds |
| Dimensions | 5.5 x 0.85 x 8.2 inches |
| Best Sellers Rank | #13,817 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #664 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books) #684 in Literary Fiction (Books) #1,843 in Murder Thrillers |
| Customer Reviews | 4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars (11,366) |
