‘To accept the absurdity of a situation is to accept the humanness of it,’ Percival Everett once observed in a rare interview. His extraordinary novels and stories are brimming over with the everyday absurdities of life, alongside unfunny matters like terminal illness and casual cruelty. His most recent comic masterpiece, The Trees, which was short-listed for this year's Booker prize, is as fine a literary balancing act between outrageous farce and deep seriousness as can be imagined.
It opens in Money, Mississippi, the town in which the 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched and murdered
