James

James is a novel by the American writer Percival Everett, published in 2024. It is a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved man at the centre of it.

The novel follows the same river journey as Mark Twain's book but tells it from inside the character Twain called Jim, who in Everett's version is a man who has learned to let the white people around him believe he is less than he is. The mechanics of that performance are the substance of the book: the language he uses with each audience, what he can allow himself to say, and what happens when he and Huck are separated and he has to survive on his own. Everett also gives him a family and a plan, which Twain never did, and rewrites several of the episodes of the original so that the reader sees what the earlier novel left out. The book is at once an adventure on the Mississippi and a satire about the version of the story that American literature has carried for over a century.

Everett has published more than thirty books across several genres, and this one was widely reviewed and shortlisted for major prizes in the year it appeared.