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.
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 utopic 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.
