Water Dancer: A Novel

#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 ChronicleNOMINATED 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