Kindred: Gift Edition

One of the 100 best novels ever published in English (The Guardian)¡¤ One of the most consequential novels of the past 100 years (The Atlantic) ¡¤ One of the most essential books published in the U.S. since 1776 (Publishers Weekly)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¡°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).