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A Novel
A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past.
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) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn't know or, more accurately, doesn't care.
What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It's not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can't let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard's drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he's made for his art and the secrets he's kept from his wife.
So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (5/21/2026)
FINISHED: There is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone deserves its recent Pulitzer Prize for the journalistic excellence with which the author followed five families experiencing housing insecurity despite working (sometimes multiple jobs). They live so close to the edge financially that anything...
-Anne_Glasgow
"Engrossing... . [Percival Everett's] deft plotting and wry wit sustain multiple levels of intrigue, not only about how each of the subplots resolves itself, but how they all fit together." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Art, friendship, family, and sex all jostle for priority of focus in the prolific Everett's contemplative new novel... . [An] intellectually provocative work." ―Publishers Weekly
"Finely executed... . Literary chameleon [Percival] Everett can veer from wicked cultural satire (Erasure, one of the most inventive novels of this young century) to absurdism to action fiction, this centrist work will surely appeal to Everett readers, and its self-reflective realism should bring in some news ones as well." ―Library Journal
"In his always insightful style, Everett offers a portrait of a man sensitive to the slightest nuance of color and composition but often oblivious to the complexities and subtleties of human relationships, a man struggling to unite the pieces of himself into a harmonious whole, a man worthy of love and family." ―Booklist
This information about So Much Blue was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Michael Avedon
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
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