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. In Watershed, Percival Everett 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.

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

Read Percival’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

James is a profound and ferociously funny novel from one of our greatest living writers, Percival Everett.

The Sunday Times Bestseller
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Finalist for the Orwell 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 . . .

A ‘Book of the Year’ in The Observer, The Times & Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Spectator, New Statesman, Independent, TLS, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, i newspaper, The Economist, The Irish Times, The New York Times, TIME and The New Yorker

‘Who should read this book? Every single person in the country’ – Ann Patchett

‘My favourite novel this year’ – Salman Rushdie

‘James has the potential to become a classic . . . thrilling, bold and profound’ – The Sunday Times

An enthralling and ferociously funny reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Written by Booker Prize-shortlisted Percival Everett, his novel Erasure is now released as the critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning film American Fiction, and James is set to be the literary event of 2024.

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 begin to 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 must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .

From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.

‘Gripping, painful, funny, horrifying . . . a consummate performance to the last’ – The Observer

‘This is the work of an American master at the peak of his powers’ – Financial Times

‘Both a page-turner and a profound meditation on the ramifications of slavery and self-hood . . . Luminous’ – TLS

The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an Oscar-winning actor, and serious amount of shares in the Turner Corporation.

Percival Everett’s novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not Sidney learns to navigate a world that doesn’t know what to do with him.

This novel ranks as one of the greatest achievements of Percival Everett, an overlooked master of American storytelling.

Wala Kitu is a professor of mathematics at Brown University, specializing in nothing. Kitu is content with nothing – studying it, having it, doing it – until his research places him in the sights of billionaire and would-be Bond villain John Sill, who enlists the professor’s help to steal a deposit of nothing from Fort Knox and use it to reduce the United States of America to nothing.

Sill wants vengeance for another act of all-American villainy: the murder of his father, a witness to the state-sanctioned assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. His mission is everything: ‘This country has never given anything to us and it never will.’

‘Clever, funny and mercilessly satirical.’ – The Times

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

Read Percival’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

A Sunday Times Fiction Book of the Year
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
A Sunday Times Novel of the Year

‘He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece.’ – Los Angeles Times

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, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Erasure, adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction.

‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knock out comedy.’ – The New York Times

** 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