Percival Everett’s The Trees, Dua’s Monthly Read for September, is a searing, genre-defying novel that takes aim at America’s racial violence and the deep scars it leaves behind – and doesn’t let you look away. With more than 30 books to his name, Percival is a master of bending and breaking literary conventions in the best way – turning westerns, thrillers and even academic fiction into vehicles for deeper truths. If The Trees gripped you, here’s where to go next in his brilliantly unpredictable body of work...
Suder (1983)
Percival’s first published novel is unpredictable, eccentric and very Percival Everett. Craig Suder, third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is in a slump. His batting average is shocking, his marriage somehow worse, and he secretly fears he’s inherited his mother’s insanity. Ordered to take a mid-season rest, Suder instead takes his LP of Charlie Parker’s Ornithology and flees.
Erasure (2001)
This book, which was adapted into the 2023 Oscar-winning film American Fiction, follows academic and novelist Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison. Monk’s agent wants him to write books that are ‘more Black’. In frustration, he writes an outrageous novella, My Pafology, to test the limits of what the publishing industry will accept in the name of ‘ghetto fiction’ – and, to his horror, they lap it up.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009)
With the main character named ‘Not Sidney Poitier’, you know this is going to be a wild romp about identity. The sudden death of Not Sidney’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and is adopted by Ted Turner (yes, the American media mogul and founder of CNN). A weird and wonderful classic.
Telephone (2020)
Telephone is an exploration of love, loss and grief. The story follows geologist Zach Wells, who is grappling with the reality of his young daughter’s degenerative health condition. Experimental to his core, Percival published three slightly different versions of the novel, each with small shifts in phrasing and events that lead to three different endings.
James (2024)
In this breathtaking retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim, Percival reclaims the character’s voice from the literary margins with power, precision and dazzling wit. Crucially, James is resurrected from the graveyard of racist archetypes and is given multiple dimensions and a character arc of his own.
The Trees by Percival Everett is Dua’s Monthly Read For September – discover her full conversation with the author and more with the Service95 Book Club...
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READ the story of Emmett Till and how his murder launched a movement
