Walk into any independent bookshop and you’re likely to see the book James front and center.
Written by Percival Everett, the story is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and follows Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his journey. Not only did the book receive the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, but it also won the Kirkus Prize, was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize, and was named Audiobook of the Year in our inaugural Bookseller Choice Awards.
But many readers haven’t heard of Everett until James, despite the author having published over 30 novels and short story collections and having his book Erasure released as an award-winning film late last year (titled American Fiction). Everett’s collection of stories is rich and vast, spanning genres and topics, and worth exploring.
We’ve pulled together a list of favorites, including thoughts from our bookselling partners, to get you started!
James
James reimagines Mark Twain’s classic from Jim’s perspective. The novel follows Jim’s escape from slavery, his journey with Huck down the Mississippi, and his quest to reunite with his family. Everett’s retelling maintains key elements of the original while offering a fresh, thought-provoking narrative that explores themes of race, identity, and freedom in antebellum America.
What Libro.fm’s partner booksellers have to say:
“My favorite audiobook for 2024 so far, Dominic Hoffman’s brilliant narration of James alternately shocked, awed, revealed and made me chuckle. This tale may be set in the world of Huckleberry Finn, but it takes the listener down some side streams along the way. An absolute must listen for literary fiction and adventure lovers. “
— Angie • The Country Bookshop
“This brilliant retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view comes to life with narrator Dominic Hoffman. Relive Huck’s mischievous adventures through the eyes of Jim as both characters come to some profound realizations about humanity, slavery, and racism.”
— Sharon • Book Bound Bookstore
“James, Percival Everett’s brilliant retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel that was begging to be recorded. Everett’s Jim, Huck’s fellow runaway, is literate. He reads, writes, and is bilingual secretly (of course) -speaking ‘slave’ with his masters and when white folks are near, but with eloquent English (and occasionally, French) otherwise. All the pathos of Twain’s novel are here, but the humor and emotion of Dominic Hoffman’s narration is a performance not to be missed.”
— Cheryl • Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
James is also one of the Libro.fm’s Top 10 Bestselling Audiobooks of 2024, based on sales through our 3,000+ independent bookshop partners.
Other Audiobooks by Percival Everett
Erasure
Published in 2001, Erasure received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction and was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film American Fiction.
“I’d only been meaning to read Erasure for 23 years, but sadly it took the confluence of a Hollywood movie and a new Percival Everett novel for me to finally get around to it. Better late than never, right? Erasure is a masterful satire about the expectations of being Black, of what Black writers are allowed to write about (spoiler alert: being Black) and the fetishization by white people of what they think Black culture is.”
— Rachel • The Book Table
The Trees
The Trees, an uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
“I don’t know what I was expecting, but ‘gruesomely hilarious 70’s-cop-show/zombie flick mashup with enough satire to satisfy the hippest professor, and enough slapstick to keep any reader guffawing while barreling through the suspense’ is what the book delivered. By which I mean to say: this book is downright Shakespearean. I’ll probably listen again to tease out the themes, appreciate the snappy dialogue and hell-bent pacing, and mull over the social justice, but I expect I’ll laugh even harder the second time. What a wild ride!”
— Nialle • The Haunted Bookshop
Dr. No
Awarded the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Dr. No, follows Wala Kitu, a mathematics professor specializing in “nothing.” He becomes embroiled in a plot with aspiring supervillain John Sill. Sill plans to rob Fort Knox of a shoebox containing “nothing” to execute a scheme of turning a town into nothingness. With the help of astrophysicist Eigen Vector, Kitu attempts to thwart Sill’s plan.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier
In this novel, readers meet protagonist Not Sidney Poitier as he grows up with billionaire Ted Turner and his girlfriend Jane Fonda, navigates systemic racism in attempts to leave Atlanta, and attempts to solve a murder alongside his professor, Percival Everett. The story is prefaced with a very relevant fictitious persons disclaimer.
Assumption
Everett delivers the familiar elements of a stereotypical western—the quiet lawman who sets out to deliver justice, broken bad guys, women in trouble, a kindhearted mother—and then gradually undermines everything you think you know. Readers meet Ogden Walker, a deputy sheriff in the tiny town of Plata, N.M. When a body is discovered and a stranger comes to town, Walker will have to up his game to become the detective who solves the crime. As Everett reveals that all of Walker’s assumptions have been wrong, he does the same for readers.
So Much Blue
An abstract painter and family man, Kevin Pace appears to live an idyllic life in New England. But as Pace confronts a white canvas, readers are made privy to the secrets that itch beneath the painter’s skin. Everett takes readers back to 1979, when Pace traveled with a friend to El Salvador to retrieve a missing friend. Years later, Pace himself disappeared in Europe, where an affair with a talented, much younger artist disrupted his life.
Telephone
Perhaps his most audacious novel, Everett has written and published three different versions of Telephone. Upon returning home from a research trip, Zach Wells finds his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?
Listen to 2024 National Book Awards Nominees with Libro.fm
Have you read any of Percival Everett’s audiobooks?
Let us know which audiobook is your favorite in the comments.
