Huck reimagined This bravura rewriting of Mark Twain from enslaved Jim's pointof view is part critique and part celebration

Percival Everett's new novel lures the reader in with the brilliant simplicity of its central conceit. James is the retelling of Mark Twain's 1884 classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River.

- Marcel Theroux

While it would be possible to enjoy James without knowing the original, its power derives from its engagement with Twain's book. For British readers, it also helps to know something about the centrality of Huckleberry Finn in American literature - and African American discomfort with that centrality.

As an American growing up in the UK, I had an early taste of the first. It was a proud day in 1983 when we got our author copies of the new Puffin edition of Huckleberry Finn, with its introduction by my dad, Paul Theroux. I still have mine: ared paperback illustrated by Quentin Blake.

My dad's breezy foreword was aimed at young British readers who were unfamiliar with the book - an unimaginable category in the US, where it was a staple on the school curriculum. And yet as early as the 1950s there was growing debate about how and whether the book should be taught. There are more than 200 occurrences of the N-slur in the text. How would that go down in America's newly desegregated classrooms?