Assumption | Percival Everett

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.

Percival Everett is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr. No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. An instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller in hardback, James was a finalist for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and was named the Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Serious Music is his latest novel. Percival Everett lives in Los Angeles.