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. 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.