Few chapters in contemporary fiction land with the resonance and rage of Chapter 64 in Percival Everett’s The Trees – Dua’s Monthly Read for September, which confronts the brutal legacy of racial violence in America with satirical force. In this Service95 Book Club exclusive, the Booker-shortlisted author lends his own voice to this stark, haunting passage.
This chapter recounts the names of the murdered, the lynched, the disappeared. Some remembered. Some known only as “unknown male”, “unknown female”. Some too-often forgotten. As Percival reads the names aloud – line after line, page after page – what begins as a character’s obsessive act becomes a collective reckoning. This moment in the novel is a roll call of history’s brutality, and hearing it aloud forces us to sit with its weight.
It’s a powerful reminder of the lives that anchor The Trees, a novel that blends genre, satire, and grief into something utterly unignorable.
Watch Percival’s reading here or listen to it as a podcast here
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...
WATCH Dua’s interview with the author, Percival Everett
LISTEN to the interview on the go with the new Service95 Book Club podcast
BOOKMARK the novels and music that inspire Percival Everett
READ the story of Emmett Till and how his murder launched a movement
DISCOVER what to read next in Percival Everett’s back catalogue
