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.