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Assumption

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Assumption

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Ron Butler
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About this listen

In Assumption, Percival Everett is on 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.

Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.

 Absurdist African American Genre Fiction Mystery Crime Fiction

Critic reviews

All we can do is hang on and go along for the intellectually stimulating and genre-bending ride, in which bodies and assumptions fall quickly by the wayside
[Assumption] is a quick, bracing and ultimately enigmatic work about the deception of appearances—anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie
Everett, who has put his uniquely wacky spin on genres from Greek myths to westerns, does the same for crime fiction in his effective follow-up to I Am Not Sidney Poitier . . . [A] shocking tale.
All stars
Most relevant
Good dialogue and an excellent narrative performance kept me listening, albeit with growing incredulity. Yes, our assumptions have been upended by the close, but the resolution is a cop-out. As for the writing, it's good, but the standard isn't up to the hype.

Underwhelming

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