The Trees

“How to explain The Trees? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read.” Read more...

Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“That’s one of the most powerful elements of this book—the disjunction between the horror and the humour. Again, this is a historical narrative, beginning with the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and addressing racial oppression in the United States, but with wonderful moments of fantasy, mysticism, magic, mixed with knockabout farce. It’s disconcerting, while you’re thinking about the long tradition of lynching in the South, to have these Keystone Cops moments. But it does intensify the emotional response and keeps you thinking on every page about what it is really like to live with this kind of systemic injustice over centuries.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator