Beautifully written, this is a deeply and soulfully imagined look at slavery and human aspirations.” “Coates brings his considerable talent for racial and social analysis to his debut novel, which captures the brutality of slavery and explores the underlying truth that slaveholders could not dehumanize the enslaved without also dehumanizing themselves. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed.” “In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation’s most important writers, tackling one of America’s oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. 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. 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. 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. 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 utopic movements in the North. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her-but was gifted with a mysterious power. Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. In his boldly imagined first novel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families.

Publisher: One World, Penguin Random House.Genre: Best Books 2019, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction.

The water dancer goodreads