Book recommendations, reviews, and reading lists.
The Trees
by Percival Everett
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| Published | 2021-09-21 |
| Pages | 305 |
| ISBN | 9781644451564 |
| Categories | Fiction |
What Readers Say
The Trees comes up in Percival Everett discussions with genuine enthusiasm — when Everett won the 2025 Pulitzer for James, a reader in the announcement thread said they hadn't read that one yet but The Trees was amazing, and they were excited. That's the dynamic: readers arrive at Everett through one book and get immediately directed to the others. One reader describes Everett's sensibility as "humor, disillusionment, whip-smart thoughts" — and The Trees is where those qualities are most concentrated and most dangerous. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which confirms it's taken seriously; it's also a page-turner, which confirms it works.
Who It's For
Readers who want literary fiction with teeth and a body count. If you loved James and want to see what else Everett can do, this is the first stop — but the experience is completely different. Where James is controlled and classical, The Trees is angrier, funnier, and more surreal. The tonal shifts (murder mystery to satire to something much darker and stranger) are the point, not the problem. If you came to Everett through Erasure and want to see him operating at full satirical velocity, this is the novel. Anyone who's been looking for a literary thriller that takes the history of lynching seriously without sanitizing it.
Reading Context
Published 2021, Graywolf Press. Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The novel is set in Money, Mississippi — where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 — and the connection is explicit. Black men who resemble Till keep appearing next to the bodies of murdered white men across the rural South; the pattern starts local and goes national. Two Black detectives from the MBI investigate. Pairs with James for Everett completists, and with The Underground Railroad for readers drawn to speculative approaches to racial violence in American history. If you want more Everett after this: Erasure is the other essential satirical novel, and together they show the full range of what he can do.
