Percival Everett Audiobooks

Walk Me to the Distance, the 1985 novel that proves the Pulitzer winner's edge came early

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Who is Percival Everett?

Percival Everett, born in 1956, is an American author and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California – and, by his own description, ‘pathologically ironic’. He has ranged across western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction, with much of the work trained, satirically, on questions of race and identity in the United States.

Long admired by those in the know, Everett has lately become impossible to ignore. He is best known for Erasure, from 2001, later adapted as the film American Fiction, along with I Am Not Sidney Poitier and The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. His 2024 novel James, also a Booker finalist, swept up the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a run of recognition few living novelists can match.

Percival Everett in audiobooks

Our catalogue features Walk Me to the Distance, a reminder that Everett’s shelf rewards exploration well beyond the recent prize-winners. The qualities that built his reputation – irony wielded with surgical precision, genre conventions picked up, inspected and quietly dismantled – make him a distinctive presence in audio, where tone is everything and a good deadpan carries beautifully. Listeners who arrived by way of the recent acclaim will find the sharpness was there all along. For UK listeners who like fiction with a formidable mind behind it, Everett is among the American writers most worth your hours.