‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy’ – The New York TimesDavid Larson can never go home.His parents are dead. His sister and her hippie husband, staunchly anti-war, won''t even have the newly returned Vietnam veteran in the house. So Larson takes his chances on the road, travelling west from Georgia until he breaks down in the nowhere town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming.There he finds lodging with Chloë Sixbury, a one-legged sexagenarian widow, and her disabled son. Their ersatz family is complete when Larson takes in Butch, a Vietnamese girl abandoned at the highway rest stop where he works, but at the edge of this tableau lingers the unmistakable spectre of violence.Blending the grotesquerie of the Southern Gothic with the Western''s codes of frontier justice, in Walk Me to the Distance Percival Everett renders a vivid and haunting landscape of the American badlands, where cruelty is the lingua franca.Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.Read Percival''s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel James in paperback now.

James by Percival Everett is a profound and ferociously funny meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love. From the author of The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American 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 . . .

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 sixty-five 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. From the author of James, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction.

Je cosi shnilého ve státě Mississippi - a nejen tam. Záhadné vraždy bělochů přitahují pozornost k tuctovému městečku Prachy. A dva detektivy, kteří je přijeli vyšetřovat, tu nevítají zrovna s otevřenou náručí. Na pozadí vyšetřování postupně vyvstává děsivý obraz rasového násilí, které se jako krev rozlévá po všech státech bývalého Jihu už desítky let. Sérii brutálních vražd spojuje přítomnost dalšího mrtvého těla - muže, který se velmi podobá Emmettu Tillovi, mladému černošskému chlapci, zlynčovanému ve stejném městě před 65 lety. Vypadá to, že oběti lynčů se po letech domáhají odepřené spravedlnosti samy, tedy jen s malou pomocí místní vědmy a jejích stoupenců, a dávají padouchům ochutnat vlastní medicínu. Román Jižanské stromy divné ovoce nesou z pera amerického autora Percivala Everetta zpracovává téma černého svědomí Spojených států, a to s velkou dávkou černého humoru, okořeněného kapkou černé magie. Nestandardním způsobem předestírá palčivé a dosud neuzavřené otázky, které stále jitří americkou společnost.

Introduced by Brandon Taylor - Booker-shortlisted author of Real Life - Erasure is an unforgettable, satirical but tender novel about race and cultural expectations in contemporary America.