#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
