Percival Everett takes Huckleberry Finn and gives the novel to Jim. The Jim of Everett’s telling is educated, perceptive, and running a careful calculation about how to survive inside a system designed to destroy him. The Huck we thought we knew looks different from this vantage point.
The novel alternates between brutality and precise comic timing, sometimes within the same paragraph. Everett writes dialogue that carries more weight than it appears to and scenes that accumulate meaning over several hundred pages before landing exactly. The ending is extraordinary.
It won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 2025. The Picador paperback arrived in February 2025. If you read one novel this year, make it this one.
£9.99 - waterstones.com