9: War

Percival Everett's electrifying re-imagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and winner of 2025's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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: Jim finds himself exacting terrible revenge, when he finds out what has happened to his wife and daughter...

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