Background Circle Background Circle

The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club): A Novel


Price: $13.99
(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC – Details)


Number one New York Times best seller

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) 

In development as a major motion picture

Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films

Nominated for the NAACP Image Award 

Named One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by:

  • Time
  • The Washington Post
  • Chicago Tribune
  • Vanity Fair
  • Esquire
  • Good Housekeeping
  • Paste
  • Town & Country
  • 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)


Get more included with membership:
Get more included with membership:

1 credit a month

1 credit a month

The Plus Catalog

The Plus Catalog

Podcasts

Podcasts

Related Posts
I Promise
I Promise

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller! An Instant Indie Bestseller! *An Amazon Best Book Read more

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn urgent primer on race and racism, from the Read more

Full, Full, Full of Love
Full, Full, Full of Love

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) Warm illustrations spice up this rhythmical ode to the joys of family and Read more

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) In the best-selling tradition of Sloan Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake Read more

Lola at the Library (Lola Reads)
Lola at the Library (Lola Reads)

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) Learn about the library, checking out books, and story time with Lola.  Every Read more

Deacon King Kong: A Novel
Deacon King Kong: A Novel

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) One of Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of the Year"Oprah's Book Club PickNamed one Read more

Dancing in the Wings
Dancing in the Wings

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) Sassy is a long-legged girl who always has something to say. She wants Read more

Black People Invented Everything: The Deep History of Indigenous Creativity
Black People Invented Everything: The Deep History of Indigenous Creativity

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) Who invented the traffic light? What about transportation itself? Farming? Art? Modern chemistry? Read more

Hair Love
Hair Love

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) "I love that Hair Love is highlighting the relationship between a Black father Read more

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as Read more

I Am Enough
I Am Enough

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) A #1 New York Times bestseller and Goodreads Choice Awards picture book winner! This is Read more

Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves

Price: $13.99(as of Feb 17, 2021 17:24:19 UTC - Details) NOMINATED FOR AN NAACP IMAGE AWARD • An inspiring collection of essays by black Read more