by Ta-Nehisi Coates
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.
“This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle
NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal
“Nearly
every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative
descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid
vocabulary.”—Entertainment Weekly
Young Hiram Walker
was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed
of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years
later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his
life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring
scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.
So begins
an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of
Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the
wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic
movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war
between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family
he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an
atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the
violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to
simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s
most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Praise for The Water Dancer
“Ta-Nehisi
Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who
changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015
memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations—and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer .
. . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical
significance. . . . What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his
notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound
that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.”—Rolling Stone