James

Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the man Twain called Jim, and the first thing he changes is the voice. In front of white people, James speaks the dialect they expect, because performing incapacity is the safest available strategy. Alone, and with other enslaved people, he is articulate, sardonic and extremely well read, having taught himself in the judge's library and taken positions on Locke and Voltaire.

The river journey is the one you know and almost nothing else is. James is running because he has learned he is to be sold south and separated from his wife and daughter, which gives the escape an urgency Huck's version never had. He acquires a pencil at real cost and begins writing, and the novel becomes about who is permitted to author an account of themselves.

Everett is very funny, and the comedy runs directly alongside brutality without softening it. There is a long central sequence in which James, to survive, joins a travelling minstrel troupe and is obliged to perform in blackface as a white man performing a Black man, which is the novel's whole argument compressed into one grotesque job. The final third departs from Twain entirely and goes somewhere considerably harder.

You do not need to have read Huckleberry Finn, though the book is sharper if you have. It moves fast, it is around three hundred pages, and it is among the most immediately gripping prize winners in years. The chapters are short, the dialogue does most of the work, and readers who normally bounce off literary fiction tend to finish this one in a weekend. Best for readers who want a novel that argues with a canonical text rather than bowing to it.