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Telephone

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About this listen

'[Percival Everett's] books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking . . . sad, affecting and marvelous' New York Times

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Telephone is an astonishing story of love, loss and grief from Percival Everett, author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (now an Oscar-nominated film).

Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in an incredibly niche field, he spends his days playing chess with his daughter, trading puns with his wife as she does yoga, and dodging committee work at the college where he teaches.

After his daughter is diagnosed with a fatal illness, Wells finds a cryptic plea for help tucked into a secondhand jacket bought online. Desperately seeking a way avoid his newfound sense of powerlessness, he embarks for New Mexico on a quixotic rescue mission.

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.

 African American Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

Achingly beautiful prose
[Percival Everett's] books always feel like an encounter with substantive, playful thinking . . . truly exceptional and memorable. . . sad, affecting and marvelous.
God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics
A spellbinding, heartbreaking tale
All stars
Most relevant
Not sure what the hype was about. Main character is a bit of a chump. The story seems a bit clunky and unfinished

Slow, boring and uneventful

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