Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2024

Enthralling and ferociously funny, James by Percival Everett is a profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love. It is also a bold reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as the enslaved Jim emerges to reclaim his voice and defy the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan.

Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous, and life-changing, odyssey of them all . . .

WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.

So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all . . .

American literature’s philosopher king – and its sharpest satirist’ – The New Yorker

In Watershed, Percival Everett, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, turns his focus once again to the injustices of recent American history, exploring the relationship between Native American activists and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone Percival Everett's 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. 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 from an author with his finger on America's pulse.

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 sixty-five 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.

A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of "I Am Not Sidney Poitier
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Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution.

In "Assumption," his follow-up to the wickedly funny "I Am Not Sidney Poitier," Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, "Assumption "is a literary thriller like no other.

'Truly brilliant.' Los Angeles Review of Books 'A classic.' The Times 'A remarkable novel.' Wall Street Journal ** With a new foreword by Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals ** With your book sales at an all-time low, your family falling apart, and your agent telling you you're not black enough, what's an author to do? Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison has the answer. Or does he . . . ? Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction 'One of the most original and forceful novels to have emerged from America in years.' TLS 'A furious whirl of a book. It made me howl with laughter . . . and rage, and sorrow, and affinity.' Lisa McInerney 'Seminal doesn't even come close. This novel is Everett at his finest, full of trademark protest, humanity and incisive humour, all wrapped up in one hell of a story.' Courttia Newland 'Hilarious. . . Everett is a first-rate word wrangler.' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Part parable, part fantasy novel, part laugh-out-loud satire, American Desert is the story of Theodore Street, a college professor on the brink of committing suicide. When the decision is taken out of his hands--he's hit by a car and his head is severed from his body--he must come to terms with himself. At his funeral, he sits up in his own coffin with the stitches that bind his head to his body clearly visible. Everyone is horrified by this resurrection. He becomes a source of fear and embarrassment to his daughter, and an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press and the scientific communities, and is anointed as a sort of devil by an obscure religious cult. In the process, Theodore manages to reestablish his relationship with his estranged wife and family and to rediscover the value of his life. In this experimental, satirical, and bizarre novel, critically acclaimed author Percival Everett once again takes on the assumptions of a culture whose priorities have gone out of whack. He lampoons the press, religion, and academia while offering, ultimately, an existential meditation of what constitutes being alive.

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of "We's Lives in Da Ghetto," a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies--his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for "My Pafology "to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is--under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh--and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

The Day May Break, photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, is the first part of a global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. The people in the photos were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be re-wilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual, as we increasingly find ourselves in a kind of limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, in spite of their loss, these people and animals are the survivors. And therein lies possibility and hope.

Theodore Street is driving towards the ocean where he plans to drown himself. But, on the way, he is hit by a van and he sails through the windscreen, his head sliced from his body. At his funeral days later, he sits up in his coffin, apparently resurrected. Theodore becomes an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press, a prized specimen for scientists and Satan incarnate to an obscure religious cult deep in the desert. Fascinating, surreal, and wildly satirical, Percival Everett sends up the press, religion, UFOs and the military, and offers a meditation on what it is to be alive.

A hilarious, ground-breaking and insightful novel, Glyph successfully blends the feverish plot of a thriller with the philosophical depth of Barthes. Narrated by a baby genius Ralph; a baby with an IQ of 475, who is much more at home with the post-modernist thought of Voltaire than reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears. However, word soon spreads about this miracle gift, and Ralph is soon kidnapped and held hostage by a child psychologist, who runs tests on him. What follows is a number of successive kidnaps, and a linguistic adventure unlike any other.

These poems question the sounds that are meaning. They interrogate where meaning resides and whether they are in any way, rigidly or loosely, wed to the words that carry it. There is a nod toward logic and at once an acceptance of its limits. These poems are landscapes, the meaning altering with the movement of clouds, with the changing light. Irony sometimes is the way we can be earnest.

For the plainspoken men and women of these stories, small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. Cowboys cavort and sheriffs shoot, certainly, but don't let the familiar trapping of your average Western fool you - these short stories are deeply philosophical meditations of the surreality of human existence.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth.

In Trout's Lie, Percival Everett explores the semantic relationship between sense and so-called nonsense—and questions whether either is actually possible.

An exceptional new collection of short stories by Percival Everett, author of the highly praised and wickedly funny novel "Erasure"
"People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid."
A cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen, and a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed car chase with the cops after stealing the car that blocks the garbage bin at his apartment building. A stranger gets a job at a sandwich shop and fixes everything in sight: a manual mustard dispenser, a mouthful of crooked teeth, thirty-two parking tickets, and a sexual-identity problem.
Percival Everett is a master storyteller who ingeniously addresses issues of race and prejudice by simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the human condition.

An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from "one of our culture's preeminent novelists" (Los Angeles Times) Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area--the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon--he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter's slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he's ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

"The horse isn't supposed to make decisions. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the rider is supposed to make decisions. If the horse gets ahead of you, you might get left behind."
Training horses is dangerous--a head-to-head confrontation with 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of fear and tolerance.
As the first blizzard of the season gains momentum, John is forced to reckon not only with the daily burden of unruly horses, a three-legged coyote pup, an escape-artist mule, and too many people, but also a father-son war over homosexuality, random hate-crimes, and--perhaps most frightening of all--a chance for love.
Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Everett offers a brilliant novel that explores the alarming consequences of hatred in a divided America.