Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Water Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award-winning author of "Between the World and Me," releases his first novel. Coates will appear in conversation with Atlanta's Tayari Jones about his boldly imagined work of magic and adventure entitled "The Water Dancer."
Ticket prices are $38, $50 and $75 and include a first edition copy of the new book. Clicking the "Buy Tickets" button will take you to the Ticketmaster event site.
We will have a supply of tickets—at all levels—for purchase at A Cappella. These tickets will be available at the store beginning Thursday, July 18 at 10 a.m.
Buyers who purchase their tickets by Oct. 15 may pick up their book ahead of time at A Cappella Books. If you buy your ticket after Oct. 15, you'll have to wait until the night of the event to pick up your book at Atlanta Symphony Hall.
About the Book
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage—and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child—but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram’s private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery 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 utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind—but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.
This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author’s bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, "The Water Dancer" is the story of America’s oldest struggle—the struggle to tell the truth—from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers.
About the Author
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of "The Beautiful Struggle," "We Were Eight Years in Power," and "Between the World and Me," which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Coates lives in New York City with his wife and son.
