James

Jim learns that a New Orleans buyer is about to purchase him, which would part him for good from his wife and their little girl, so he hides out to work out a plan. Huck, meanwhile, has staged his own murder to escape his brutal father, and the two end up together on a raft on the Mississippi, heading for the uncertain refuge of free territory, with Jim well aware he will be blamed for the boy's death. Retelling Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's side, the novel makes the dialect he speaks to white people a disguise and a means of survival: he has secretly worked through Judge Thatcher's library and argues in dreams with Voltaire and Locke. Their journey through a violent slaveholding South is full of danger and narrow escapes.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

United States, antebellum era

First published

2024

Author's age

68 when first published

ISBN

9780385550369 (Doubleday, United States)

9781035031238 (Mantle, United Kingdom)

9781035031269 (Picador, United Kingdom)

9780593686867 (Vintage, United States)

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Wikidata