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  • The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Narrated by: Joe Morton
  • Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (256 ratings)

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The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)

Written by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrated by: Joe Morton
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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
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What the critics say

"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)

What listeners say about The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)

Average Customer Ratings
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Wonderful Listen

A wonderful story and amazing narrator! It didn’t take long to fall into this book and the story. It took me away and I was sad when it was over. I could have kept listening for hours.

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Magical and beautiful

This story is magical and beautiful. The narration is so powerful in its ability to place you in every circumstance that you feel like you can not only experience but touch.
Beautiful.

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2 people found this helpful

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So deeply evocative

Very much enjoyed this deep journey through what slavery was like in Virginia, and getting a better sense of how twisted and tangled it became.
My only complaint is that I found the mysticism aspect ultimately didn’t feel real and I simply didn’t know what to do with it. But that may simply be my shortcomings.

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Enticing and heart wrenching

It was a most heart wrenching story told brilliantly! I could not stop listening and sad when it finished.. We all heard stories of slavery before but Ta-Nehisi managed to convey even more meaning to the suffering in this book.

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wonderful

this is my favourite book in a long time. fabulous story with some history. great characters and wonderful writing.

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Truly remarkable tale

This unique novel is narrated by the most talented man who breaks out into song intermittently. What an unusual addition to a most enchanting novel.
This is the number 1 for the year in my opinion!

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Fabulous Story

This is not normally the type of book I would read but it was well worth every moment. Although the story is fiction the it felt very real. To be enslaved with no control over any aspect of your life is uncomprehendable and what would you do to escape? There is so much more to this. Very well written and told beautifully by Joe Morton the perfect voice for the telling.

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Want to learn more

OMG I thought I knew about the underground railway but I need more information. amazing story and I love it all

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Great narrator

What an amazing read, narrator was brilliantly chosen. I did not want to stop listening to eat. What a remarkable depiction of the era of the Underground Railroad, the lack of racist words or the depiction of physical abuse. It made the book definitely more tolerable to read, yet my heart still pained at times listening to the many injustice that happened.

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Great listen!

Took me through Hiram’s life reflection and made me walk in his shoes. Great narration with character distinction! Recommend a listen

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