The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation

Soon to be an FX Networks TV series with a pilot directed by Janicza Bravo (Zola), written by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), and executive produced by Jacobs-Jenkins and Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain)

Product Code: 3180
ISBN: 9780807006924
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Beacon
Pages: 272
Published Date: 09/20/2022
Availability:In stock
N/A
Price: $27.95

The January 2023 Justice and Spirit: Unitarian Universalist Book Club selection.

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).


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“Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again.” — Harlan Ellison

“One cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.” — Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

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