The Trees
Percival Everett
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From the publisher
The brand new novel from American master Percival Everett.
‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’
– New York Times
‘The novelist has regularly exploded our models of genre and identity. In The Trees, he’s raising the stakes, confronting America’s legacy of lynching in a mystery at once hilarious and horrifying.’
– The New Yorker
‘Blends Everett’s wit with elegy and solemnity.’
–The Boston Globe
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, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.
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.