We are incredibly thrilled to announce that not one, but TWO of our brilliant publishers’ books have been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022! From Influx Press, the incredibly gripping and poignant thriller The Trees by Percival Everett, and from Galley Beggar Press, our fantastic July Book of the Month After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz. Both deserve to claim the spotlight for their eye-opening and unflinching themes of social injustice and fighting back oppression in cascading styles of accelerating prose, both captivating and exhilarating.
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
(9781913111243, 15/07/2022, Galley Beggar Press, p/b, £9.99)
Wondrously illuminating the fascinating and inspiring lives of nineteenth- and twentieth century women, Schwartz brings us her masterpiece of fragmented prose in After Sappho. A celebratory war-cry of previously oppressed artists, writers, sapphists, feminists and more, Schwartz brings to light voices which were once silenced and lets the glorious minds and words of Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker and Sarah Bernhard amongst many others shine brightly into the modern day in this reimagining of storm-worthy trailblazers.
The Trees by Percival Everett
(9781914391170, 24/03/2022, Influx Press, p/b, £9.99)
Sixty-five years after the violent murder of a young Black boy called Emmett Till, a series of killings takes place in the town of Money, Mississippi. At every scene of the crime, there is always a second body — a second body which bears a resemblance to Emmett. Up against the racist resistance of the white citizens against the case, two detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation link the murders as retributive justice for Emmett, yet soon hear similar homicides are happening all over America. Percival Everett aims a powerful bullseye at institutional and cultural racism in society, past and present, and at police brutality. In a novel which will have enduring significant reverberations, The Trees confronts centuries of racial injustice on an enormous, nationwide scale.
