Assumption
21 March 2024Synopsis
In Assumption, Percival Everett is on top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning.
Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman’s murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt takes him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other from the author of Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated feature film.
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.
Details
21 March 2024
9781035036424Reviews
All we can do is hang on and go along for the intellectually stimulating and genre-bending ride, in which bodies and assumptions fall quickly by the waysideNPR
[Assumption] is a quick, bracing and ultimately enigmatic work about the deception of appearances—anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lieThe Wall Street Journal
Everett, who has put his uniquely wacky spin on genres from Greek myths to westerns, does the same for crime fiction in his effective follow-up to I Am Not Sidney Poitier . . . [A] shocking tale.Publishers Weekly
