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The unmissable debut novel by the critically acclaimed author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power - a richly imagined and compulsively page-turning journey to freedom

Hiram Walker is born into bondage on a Virginia plantation. But he is also born gifted with a mysterious power that he won´t discover until he is almost a man, when he risks everything for a chance to escape. One fateful decision will carry him away from his makeshift plantation family - his adoptive mother, Thena, a woman of few words and many secrets, and his beloved, angry Sophia - and into the covert heart of the underground war on slavery.

Hidden amidst the corrupt grandeur of white plantation society, exiled as guerrilla cells in the wilderness, buried in the coffin of the deep South and agitating for utopian ideals in the North, there exists a widespread network of secret agents working to liberate the enslaved. Hiram joins their ranks and learns fast but in his heart he yearns to return to his own still-enslaved family, to topple the plantation that was his first home. But to do so, he must first master his secret power and reclaim the story of his greatest loss.

Propulsive, transcendent and blazing with truth, The Water Dancer is a story of oppression and resistance, separation and homecoming. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the covert war of an enslaved people in response to a generations-long human atrocity - a war for the right to life, to kin, to freedom.

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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. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed Publisher´s Weekly

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of the Number One New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me, winner of the National Book Award, and of the acclaimed essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power. A MacArthur ´Genius Grant´ Fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story ´The Case for Reparations´. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

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