James is a novel by author Percival Everett published by Doubleday in 2024. The novel is a re-imagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain but narrated by Huckleberry's friend on his travels, the fugitive slave Jim, rather than by Huck, as in the original. The novel won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

James is loosely based on Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with various scenes recontextualized or ending differently. The novels differ because, when Jim and Huck are separated, we learn Jim's story from Jim, rather than, as in Twain's original, Huck's story from Huck. Many characters are also reinterpreted.

In Hannibal, Missouri, Jim, a slave owned by the elderly Miss Watson, survives day-to-day by following social conventions known to every slave he encounters, including his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. While speaking standard English to each other (and privately indulging in irony and gallows humor inspired by the perils of slave life), they scrupulously code-switch to an unsophisticated patois in front of any white person, and play to type by behaving as ignorant and superstitious, to avoid the danger of drawing attention. They also allow white people to take credit for all initiatives and ideas, since proactive gestures, however innocent, risk corporal punishment.

Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, adopted child of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, freely confides in Jim, while questioning Jim about the ways of the world, such as why slavery exists. Jim takes care to buoy Huck's spirits while staying in character.

Learning that Miss Watson will sell him off, Jim flees, planning to return for his family. He hides out on nearby Jackson Island, meeting Huck, who has faked his own death to escape his abusive father. Jim and Huck flee and survive together in the wilderness. During a flood, Jim finds Huck's father dead inside a washed-away house, and keeps Huck from recognizing the body.

Jim survives a rattlesnake bite, but has a fever dream inspired by his secret autodidactic readings in Judge Thatcher's library. He debates a hallucinated Voltaire, criticizing the philosopher's belief in polygenism, and protesting that slaves may not advocate for their own civil rights, relying on privileged men like Voltaire to do so. Talking in his sleep, Jim accidentally breaks character and confuses Huck.

The two boat down the Mississippi River, finding loot from a shipwreck; Jim voraciously reads a cache of books, but soon needs to organize his own thoughts on paper. Their raft is destroyed, and Jim washes up alone in Illinois, meeting a group of cautiously friendly slaves, who advise that he cannot buy his family's freedom without a white man's help. One of the slaves steals a pencil stub for Jim, and is first lashed and then hanged, obliging Jim to solemnly record his own story in writing.

Jim is reunited with Huck, then separated again. Jim ends up bought by Daniel Decatur Emmett to join his blackface singing troupe, the Virginia Minstrels. Jim is caught off-guard to be treated with courtesy and respect by the avowedly anti-slavery troupe, but realizes that Emmett will nevertheless keep him as bonded labor—and that he faces certain death if their audience outs him as black.