The Trees [B2059]

2023 PB in gift-worthy condition. 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 and James. 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 (Emmett Till (1941-1955) was a 14 year old African-American boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store).

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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "This was SUCH a good book. So fast paced, such cool characters. Such a powerful way to write about racism past and present. The dark comedy style is new to me and I'm not normally a crime book person, but with a historical literature element to it I loved. A book that I'll think about a lot"; "Would give it 6 stars if I could. Astonishing and brutal."; "A provocative and uncomfortable read rooted in the story of Emmett Till and the wider history of lynching in America. Creative, absorbing, and confronting in the best sense - it left me thinking."