The Trees

Sunday Times Fiction Book of the Year 2022

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2022

Sunday Times Novel of the Year 2022

When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixtyfive years earlier. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America’s violent past.‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’ The New York Times