So Much Blue

Percival Everett

28 September 2023
9781035036578
240 pages

Synopsis

‘Absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression’ NEW YORK TIMES

Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet and three inches, covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know, nor does he particularly care.

What Kevin does care about are the events of the past: the affair he had with a young artist in Paris ten years ago and, further back, his journey to an El Salvador on the brink of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother. So Much Blue is a brilliant examination of how the past collides with present, and the secrets we keep from even ourselves.

So Much Blue is such a perfectly structured novel . . . A generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America's most under-recognized literary master’ NPR

By turns funny, shocking and heartbreaking, it's one of his best books to date. And with a career as distinguished as Everett's, that's saying something
So Much Blue is such a perfectly structured novel; Everett is an author who started his career off strong and just keeps getting better. It's a generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America's most under-recognized literary master, and readers will be thinking about it long after the last page.
[An] intellectually provocative work