A gentle linen weaver in a small English town is wrongly accused of a theft. He then goes into seclusion and finds redemption in his unselfish love for an abandoned child who mysteriously appears at his cottage.

Huck is a young, naive white boy fleeing from his drunken, dangerous Pa and Jim is a runaway slave longing to be reunited with his family. Flung together by circumstance, they journey down the Mississippi together on a log raft, each in search of his own definition of freedom. Their daring adventures along the way provide both entertainment and a satirical look at the moral values of the Deep South of the 1800s.

Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend.

"Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhnosky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom the New York Review of Books declared. 'the English-speaking world is indebted.' ... First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the...