'The Water Dancer' by Ta-Nehesi Coates

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book summary

The Water Dancer is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel: a historical novel of slavery, memory, and escape, edged with the supernatural but grounded in the brutal mechanics of American bondage.

Its narrator, Hiram Walker, is born into slavery in Virginia and gifted with an extraordinary memory, except when it comes to his mother, whose loss sits at the centre of the book like a wound. After a near-fatal accident, he begins to understand that memory itself may be a form of power.

From there the novel opens into the hidden workings of the Underground Railroad, but Coates uses this as backdrop to exploring what survives erasure: grief, kinship, story, the body’s memory of dispossession.

It is a serious, ambitious novel — lush rather than spare, mythic without drifting off into vagueness — and one that will especially appeal to readers interested in Toni Morrison-adjacent historical fiction, the afterlife of memory, and novels where realism is split open just enough to let something stranger through.

Hamish Hamilton in 2019 and printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press. In almost new condition.