The Water Dancer

Critics Review

• One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life . . . I was enthralled, I was devastated.

  Oprah Winfrey

• Slavery, forgetting and memory are at the heart of Coates’s ambitious, compelling first novel…

  TLS

• This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.

  San Francisco Chronicle

• A tale of slavery and mysterious power in this debut novel from one of America’s most exciting young writers.

  The Times

• a remarkable story about inequality, slavery, memory, freedom and dignity. I found it important and universally relevant

  Guardian

• In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation’s most important writers, tackling one of America’s oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed

  Publisher's Weekly

• Beautiful prose and wonderful characters . . . an important book written by one of the great thinkers of our times. It’s a thriller, a historical how-to, a love story and a warning. I read it one long night and the next day pressed it into everyone’s hands. Brilliant.

• Any writer tackling slavery needs to do something different with it, and The Water Dancer does just that. Coates’ rhapsodic prose spins a soaring, scorching, supernatural tale of the imagination that sets this history alight and turns it into an original work of art.

  Bernardine Evaristo

• Eagerly anticipated . . . The Water Dancer merges historical and fantasy fiction in a slavery story that Oprah Winfrey says is one of the best books she has read in her life.

  Observer

• 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.

  New York Times

• a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance . . . timeless and instantly canon-worthy.

  Rolling Stone

• Ta-Nehisi Coates has emerged as an important public intellectual and perhaps America’s most incisive thinker about race.

  New York Times

• An arresting story of fantastical power in the brutal world of human bondage . . . A transcendent, arresting work from a crucial political and literary artist

  Diana Evans