Percival Everett

It is a profound honour to be a stop on Percival Everett's first ever UK tour. Following on from his gruesomely hilarious, Booker-shortlisted novel The Trees, Percival joins us to talk about his latest novel, James. So come and join us this Spring for a rare chance to see this remarkable author in Scotland.

James

With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.

James, the new novel by Percival Everett, is a brilliant, moving, harrowing and fearlessly funny reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of and in the voice of the enslaved Jim. With James, one of the US’s most respected, decorated and inventive novelists casts radical new light on a classic of American literature in a work of gripping urgency and lacerating humour.

1861, the Mississippi River. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans, and be separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey, by raft, on the Mississippi River downward toward the elusive promise of the Free States and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he cannot protect and the constant lie he must livel Together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous odyssey of them all...

About Percival Everett

The author of over thirty books, Percival Everett's work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. ‘American Fiction’, Cord Jefferson’s film of Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, premiered to great acclaim at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.