The Trees, Percival Everett
The Trees, Percival Everett
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Trees
A Novel

Author: Percival Everett

Narrator: Bill Andrew Quinn

Unabridged: 7 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/15/2022


Synopsis

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 must-listen 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. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America's pulse.

About Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a literary shapeshifter, an author whose work defies genre and expectation. Born in 1956, he has carved out a career as one of America’s most daring and intellectually playful writers, blending satire, philosophy, and social critique across novels, short stories, and poetry. With a bibliography spanning dozens of books-including Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, a Pulitzer Prize finalist-Everett tackles race, identity, and the absurdities of modern life with razor-sharp wit and profound depth.

A professor of English at the University of Southern California, Everett is also an accomplished painter, musician, and horse trainer, embodying the restless curiosity that defines his fiction. His work, often compared to that of Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon, resists easy categorization, making him one of contemporary literature’s most unpredictable and essential voices.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Andy on January 16, 2023

I... I'm honestly not sure what just happened.........more

Goodreads review by David on August 19, 2022

This one hits hard. Percival Everett is a master stylist, as always, and here he adopts the trappings of detective fiction, coupled with bitingly funny humor, to tell a story about lynching in the United States. Everett makes no bones about the reality of lynching, showing unambiguously that it is a......more

Goodreads review by Ron on March 06, 2024

Every year there are many books I spend the next year kicking myself for not having read. At the top of that list from 2021 is “The Trees,” by Percival Everett. Having passed over “The Trees” when it came out last September, I didn’t read it when it was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Febru......more

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on March 27, 2023

Now shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award after its 2022 Booker Prize shortlisting 6th in my longlist rankings so in my own shortlist - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: [URL not allowed] “Everybody talks......more

Goodreads review by Lark on November 22, 2021

I'm a little speechless.......more