5: Minstrels

Rhashan Stone reads the winner of 2025's Pulitzer Prize by one of America's greatest contemporary authors.

Mississippi, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs. Hiding on nearby Jackson Island he tries to formulate a plan. But when his friend Huck Finn arrives with the news that he's faked his own death to escape his violent father, Jim knows he will be blamed. As so begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive promise of the Free States and beyond.

Powerful, electrifying and brimming with the dark humour, this multi award-winning novel has already become a modern classic.

Today: After evading the two white con-men, Jim finds himself hired by a band of minstrals, who, improbably, want him to perform in black face...

Reader: Rhashan Stone
Writer: Percival Everett (born 1956) is the author of over thirty books, including Telephone, Dr No, The Trees, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and won the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Erasure, which was adapted into the major Oscar-winning film American Fiction. He is the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Producer: Justine Willett
Abridger: Katrin Williams