This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. Like my last non-fiction read, Alice Hunt’s Republic, I picked it up because it deals with the time period in history that I’m currently researching for my own novel. But I also knew that Robert Harris writes brilliantly readable and well-researched historical fiction, having enjoyed his Pompeii and the Cicero trilogy. Act of Oblivion did not disappoint.

The historical background for this novel is the aftermath of the English Civil War, once Charles II has been restored to the throne. While most of the people who supported Parliament in the interregnum were given amnesties when the monarchy was restored (which they pretty much had to do, because so many people switched sides back and forth in those years depending on who was in power). The exception was the men who actually signed King Charles I’s death warrant: they were condemned to death and, since most of them either fled England or went into hiding, there was an extended manhunt to find them.

Two of the regicides, committed and devout Puritans, fled to the New England colonies, believing that among Puritan settlers there they would find a safe haven. The story that unfolds in the novel is that of those two men, who are real historical characters, though Harris rounds out the little history tells us of them into two very distinct and believable men. He also invents a third character, the man relentlessly devoted to finding them for reasons that are as much personal as political. This drama from more than four centuries ago feels as vital and vivid as if it were unfolding before us in real time. I really loved this book.

Next up in 2025: another classic novel/modern re-telling pair of books. Rereading The Scarlet Letter (another book I read in university and not since) was not as fun as rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was, and I will confess to skimming some of Hawthorne’s long passages of description and fairly purple prose. However, as I’m currently spending a lot of my time researching 17th century Puritans, it was a timely re-read.

I thought Laurie Lico Albanese’s novel Hester was a retelling of The Scarlet Letter from Hester’s point of view, but it’s not. It’s a creative re-imagining of how Hawthorne might have been inspired to write the novel. A (fictional) young Scotswoman named Isobel, descended from a long line of women who might possibly be witches, or at least have some unexpected powers, comes to Boston with her husband and meets the young Nathaniel Hawthorne. A friendship develops between them while Isobel’s (pretty awful) husband is away at sea, leading to drama, suspense, and heartbreak … and, indirectly, to the writing of The Scarlet Letter, with the premise that Isobel was the muse who inspired Hawthorne’s creation of Hester. It was an enjoyable read even if it wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

The first two books I read in 2025 were the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read in university and have not returned to in at least 35 years, maybe longer, and James, Percival Everett’s retelling of that story from the perspective of Jim, the escaping enslaved man who shares Huck Finn’s picaresque journey down the Mississippi by raft.

First: the original. Huckleberry Finn is in many ways a hard read for a twenty-first century reader, not just because of the ubiquitous use of the n-word but because of the never-questioned assumption that Jim and few other Black characters in the story are less intelligent, less capable, and less motivated than white characters — even though Jim has seized agency in his own life by running away. The novel is a pointed critique of the racism that Huck has been born into, forcing Huck to accept that helping Jim escape is the more moral action though his society has told him that “stealing” an enslaved person from a white person is theft. However, Mark Twain was, like all of us, a person of his times, and even as he was critiquing and interrogating racism, he was also accepting and perpetrating it. Within this framework, Huckleberry Finn is still quite an engaging read and an interesting character study and social satire — until the last few chapters when Tom Sawyer shows up, Twain obviously feels he needs to bring back his most popular character with all the Tom Sawyer hijinks, and the whole plot gets derailed.

The recent novel James by Black American writer Percival Everett flips the story and tells it from “Jim’s” — James’s — point of view, undermining Twain’s and Huck’s assumptions about Black intelligence and ability. In Everett’s retelling, the qualities that define the enslaved Black people in Huck Finn’s world as stupid and lazy — including the “Negro dialect” that Twain renders both painstakingly and painfully — are cloaks consciously put on to pacify white people and keep them from being alarmed, since white people get dangerous when they are alarmed. It’s in the interests of enslaved people, as James teaches those around him, to pretend to be dumber and less capable than they are, as long as their lives depend on the capricious whims of white enslavers.

Once James escapes and the story gets moving, there’s the familiar pleasure of hearing a different perspective on a well-known story. Everett sticks to Twain’s plotline for some parts of the novel and goes in entirely different directions in other parts (the entire ending deviates from the original novel, which given how bad the ending of the original is, can only be an improvement). If I wanted anything different from James, it was simply more — I wanted the novel to be longer, to give us more of James’s backstory and more of a hint of his future. There’s one particular piece of backstory revealed in the novel which, while believable, absolutely demands (for me) more explanation and perhaps some flashbacks to put it into context — but I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers.

Rereading Huck Finn and then reading James was an enjoyable and thought-provoking experience.