Trees

Percival Everett's "Trees" is a brilliant combination of dark humor, dynamic detective and historical drama. It is about the investigation of several brutal murders in the town of Money, Mississippi. And in each of these crimes there are two dead people - a brutally mutilated white man and a black man who looks like Emmett Till, a teenager who was lynched many years ago on a false accusation. The local police do not understand what is happening, so two special detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in this town steeped in racism and begin their own investigation. More and more bodies appear, some of them simply disappear from the police morgue and turn up at other murder sites, and the whole phantasmagoria turns out to be connected with a rather hidden part of American history: the systematic genocide of black people through lynching over the past century.

Only a true master of beautiful writing could handle such a book - funny and at the same time terrible, one that will make the reader laugh, get angry and sad. It is no wonder that "The Trees" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Dublin Prize and a number of other prestigious literary awards shortly after its publication in 2022.