#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 NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE
YEAR BY Time • The Washington Post • Esquire • Good Housekeeping • The New York Public Library
• The Dallas Morning News • 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
