Assumption

In Assumption, the follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in 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.

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty published works, including Zulus, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Assumption, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Telephone, The Trees, Dr. No and James. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Everett has won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Academy Award in Literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2022, The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novel Erasure has been adapted into the major film American Fiction, which was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Everett lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.