So Much Blue
‘Absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression’ New York Times
So Much Blue is a gorgeous novel about art, memory and self-deception from the author of Erasure, now an Oscar-nominated film.
Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet and three inches, covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know, nor does he particularly care.
What Kevin does care about are the events of the past: the affair he had with a young artist in Paris ten years ago and, further back, his journey to an El Salvador on the brink of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother. So Much Blue is a brilliant examination of how the past collides with present, and the secrets we keep from even ourselves.
'So Much Blue is such a perfectly structured novel . . . A generous, thrilling book by a man who might well be America's most under-recognized literary master' NPR
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Read Percival's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel James in paperback now.
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.