Fresh debuts, long-awaited sequels, must-read memoirs … the best books of the season. Plus our pick of paperbacks and children’s fiction
• Leading writers choose their holiday reading list
James by Percival Everett
In this retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 Huckleberry Finn, narrated by escaped slave Jim, the reader is pulled along on a journey of picaresque adventures as helplessly as the two runaways on the Mississippi River – and for them it’s a matter of life and death. “My name is James,” the protagonist writes with a stub of stolen pencil. “I wrote myself into being.” This angry, exhilarating, entertaining novel has been hailed as a masterpiece to equal the original.
