Available in paperback / Kindle / Audiobook, published 2024, 300 pages,
shortlisted for 2024 Booker Prize, winner of various other fiction awards
The book is the author’s response to Mark Twain’s classic story of the adventures
of early teens boy Huckleberry Finn and his black slave companion Jim set in the mid
1860’s in America’s deep south. In Twain’s original story published in 1884, the
uneducated and superstitious Huck fakes his own death to escape a drunken and
abusive father. Encountering Jim, a runaway slave, Huck narrates the story of their
escapades as they embark on a raft journey down the Mississippi River. Twain’s book,
seen as a subversive and confrontational at the time has since lost some of its bite
and become a much simpler and humorous adventure story.
In Everett’s retelling Jim (James) becomes the narrator and the lens through which
their (updated) story is told and puts forward a strongly corrective view of history
and racism as it retells the dangerous journey by raft down the Mississippi River
toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Jim's central role, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
A quick review of the Mark Twain’s original before reading Everett’s funny, moving
and stand-alone version will inform the discussion about attitudes towards slavery,
historical context and America’s current attitudes towards racism and immigration.