Recommendations
Books Like The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hiram Walker discovers he can Conduct through grief and memory
If Coates's debut novel, the Conduction's metaphor for slavery's grief and memory, and the lyrical antebellum Virginia setting drew you in, here are eight books that extend these themes.
- 1
Buy on AmazonBetween the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's letter to his son — the essential nonfiction companion; the same concerns about slavery and memory approached analytically rather than novelistically, the argument that The Water Dancer puts in narrative form.
- 2
Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winner — the most important predecessor in literary fiction that uses speculative elements to approach slavery's horror; Sethe's story is the formal and thematic precursor to Hiram's Conduction.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winner — the companion in speculative historical fiction about slavery and the Underground Railroad; literal tracks as literal trains, the revisionist mode The Water Dancer joins.
- 4
Buy on AmazonKindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler's time-travel slavery novel — the formal predecessor in speculative fiction about slavery; Dana's ability to move through time is the predecessor to Hiram's Conduction, both using speculation to make slavery's reality visceral.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Jones's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in antebellum Virginia fiction; Manchester County is Hiram's world, the plantation economy and the Black slaveholder that The Water Dancer inhabits.
- 6
Buy on AmazonHomegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Gyasi's multigenerational novel — the companion in recent literary fiction about slavery's consequences; the same Atlantic world that Hiram's plantation inhabits, traced forward across seven generations from Ghana to America.
- 7
Buy on Amazon12 Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup
Northup's 1853 memoir — the primary-source account of slavery in Virginia and Louisiana; the documentary basis that Coates's novel imaginatively transforms with the Conduction's speculative element.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Beautiful Struggle
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's memoir of growing up in Baltimore — the autobiographical companion; the nonfiction Coates who writes about his Baltimore childhood is the person who then wrote The Water Dancer about slavery and memory.
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