Historical Fiction · TenseHuckleberry Finn retold by Jim, the enslaved man who runs before he can be sold
James
He learns he is about to be sold away from his family, and runs
Jim is enslaved. When he overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs and hides on an island until he can make a plan. There he meets Huck Finn, a boy who has faked his own death to escape his violent father, and the two set off down the Mississippi on a raft toward the free states. The novel is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn retold through Jim's eyes, a darkly funny story in which his intelligence and courage come to the front.
More about this book
Who
James, called Jim, who tells the story himself in the first person. Characters from Twain's book appear around him, among them Huck, the Duke and the King, and Judge Thatcher.
World
The United States in the 1860s, in a time of slavery and growing conflict over it.
What makes it different
It is based on Mark Twain's 1885 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has said he is not writing to correct Twain but to hold an imagined conversation with him. Telling the story from Jim's side gives a view that Twain, as a white man, could not provide. The book opens with a short section titled "The Notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett" and then runs in three parts.
Feel
Historical fiction and satire, with a darkly funny tone. It won the 2024 National Book Award and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.