Mantle acquires Percival Everett’s ‘profoundly moving’ new novel
Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, has acquired the new novel by award-winning author Percival Everett.
Serious Music will be published as a lead hardback, audiobook and e-book on 23rd March 2027. Picador will publish in paperback in 2028. UK, Commonwealth and audio rights were acquired by Mantle publisher Maria Rejt from Peter Straus at RCW, on behalf of Melanie Jackson. Lee Boudreaux, vice president at Doubleday, will publish the novel in the US.
Everett is the author of more than 30 books, including The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His novel James won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The British Book Awards’ Fiction Book of the Year as well as the the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Booker Prize. Everett was also named Author of the Year at The British Book Awards 2025.
Rejt said: "Serious Music is the story of Arthur Champion, a gifted Black music scholar who is sent away to war and experiences the horrors of the Somme trenches. Surviving the slaughter, he begins to forge a new life for himself – from the jazz clubs of Paris to performing in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. His only constant companions are his humour, his abiding love for music and the pervasive racism of the age.
"It is an extraordinary, profoundly moving novel about trauma, survival and the weaponisation of art and is sure to cement Percival Everett’s reputation as one of our greatest contemporary writers."
