The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)

A Novel

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by: Joe Morton

Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

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)

©2019 Ta-Nehisi Coates (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Joe Morton doesn't just give a stellar performance of Coates's audiobook. He embodies its characters completely, making the listening experience cinematic.... Coates's first novel is steeped in magical realism, yet the parallels to America's past are clear, making this a not-to-miss listening experience. Morton's narration is equally powerful - among the year's best." (AudioFile Magazine)

"Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical. He extends the idea of the gifts of the disenfranchised to include a kind of superpower. But The Water Dancer is very much its own book, and its gestures toward otherworldliness remain grounded. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing.... In Coates’s world, an embrace can be a revelation, rare and astonishing." (Esi Edugyan, The New York Times Book Review)

"The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn’t a typical first novel.... The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.... It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

"Coates isn’t dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates’s fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain." (The Washington Post)

Powerful in surprising ways!

Of the 30 books I’ve read so far this year, this is my absolute favorite!!!! The method of storytelling lures you in and quickly gets you committed to seeing the resolution of the story/stories represented. I also love the fact that the entire story shared the impact of a strong part of our cultural history to the history of our country. Aaaand I love the imperfections of each character and how each character grows in their own journey.

“To forgive is irrelevant. To forget is death.”

Incredible narration and immersive story

The narrator in particular did an incredible job voicing all the characters distinctly and without mocking their gender differences. And I’ve never read a book quite like this from the perspective of someone who is there

Coltrane on paper

This book is groundbreaking. It drives home the insidiousness of denying someone the memory of who their people are, and the ugliness of denying another’s story. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

Moments of reflection...

A challenging view of slavery from the eyes of the oppressed and its branding.

Highly Recommended!

Loved it all! One of the bestbooks I have ever listened to....highly recommend you download and listen now.

Devine!

The words, the story, Joe Morton's hypnotic resonance - all are simply delicious! Thank you once again, Ta-Nehisi Coates!

Not what you think!

The beginning will make you think that this story is a little “out there “, but stick with it! One of the best books I’ve ever read! The narrator is also very gifted.

Exceptional and Phenomenal

Held my attention form beginning to end. Had me wanting to follow the story past it's ending. Bravo!

An amazing work of art

This book is indispensable to anyone wishing to better understand the frame of reference for African-Americans. And it is beautifully written and narrated. Enjoyed every minute.

Phenomenal Read!

I haven't read anything this poetic and prolific since Ellison's, Invisible Man, Hurston's, Their Eyes Are Watching God. This book was pure magic, live and adventure!