Where to start with Percival Everett

American novelist, born 1956. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025, the British Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year in 2025 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024.

Best Percival Everett book to start with: James (2024), on 5 of the 11 lists it could have made.

Pick up James first. It retells Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man, and it is funny and fast without losing its heart. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, the National Book Award in 2024 and Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2025, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. You do not need to have read Twain, although it adds to the fun.

Erasure is the earlier book to read second. A serious novelist, fed up with what publishers expect from Black authors, writes a parody that becomes a hit. It is very funny. The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker in 2022, starts as a murder mystery in a small Mississippi town and turns into something much angrier, and it is the most violent of his books.

Telephone, shortlisted for the Pulitzer in 2021, is the quietest and the strangest in form, so leave it until you know how he writes.