Everett retells Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from inside the character Twain kept at its edge. Jim — James — hearing he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, hides on Jackson Island, where Huck, who has faked his own death, finds him; the river journey that follows is Twain's in outline and Everett's in every meaning. James is literate, code-switching at will: among themselves the enslaved speak precise, book-learned English, and perform dialect only for white ears. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Author: Percival Everett · Original publisher: Doubleday (New York), 2024
