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The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
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Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer Makes A Big Splash
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Publisher's summary
Number one New York Times best seller
Oprah’s Book Club Pick
From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.
“This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
In development as a major motion picture
Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award
Named One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by:
- Time
- The Washington Post
- Chicago Tribune
- Vanity Fair
- Esquire
- Good Housekeeping
- Paste
- Town & Country
- The New York Public Library
- The Dallas Morning News
- Kirkus Reviews
- Library Journal
“Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary.” (Entertainment Weekly)
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey 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 idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children - the violent and capricious separation of families - and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Praise for The Water Dancer
"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations - and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer...is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance.... What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal.... Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." (Rolling Stone)
Critic reviews
"Joe Morton doesn't just give a stellar performance of Coates's audiobook. He embodies its characters completely, making the listening experience cinematic.... Coates's first novel is steeped in magical realism, yet the parallels to America's past are clear, making this a not-to-miss listening experience. Morton's narration is equally powerful - among the year's best." (AudioFile Magazine)
"Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical. He extends the idea of the gifts of the disenfranchised to include a kind of superpower. But The Water Dancer is very much its own book, and its gestures toward otherworldliness remain grounded. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing.... In Coates’s world, an embrace can be a revelation, rare and astonishing." (Esi Edugyan, The New York Times Book Review)
"The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn’t a typical first novel.... The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, 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.... It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism." (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)
"Coates isn’t dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates’s fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain." (The Washington Post)
Featured Article: The Best Black Audiobook Narrators to Listen to Right Now
A skilled performer has the ability to take the written word to new heights, infusing an author’s work with empathy, warmth, and excitement. And representation matters just as much for audio as it does for any visual medium: listeners should feel and hear themselves in art driven by powerful performers and authentic deliveries. We’ve gathered a few of the best Black audiobook narrators in the business and their can't-miss performances.
Editor's Pick
Eloquent, thoughtful, and brutally honest
"Since writing Between the World and Me—the 2015 National Book Award winner and quite possibly my favorite audiobook of all time—Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a leading figure on news panels and publications because of his eloquence, thoughtfulness, and brutal honesty on race in America. The Water Dancer is Coates’s first published work of fiction and one of the most anticipated releases this fall—and rightfully so. Set in the antebellum era, this work of historical fiction meets magical realism will stick with you long after you’ve finished listening. And there really couldn’t be a better narrator for this story than Joe Morton. If you needed any further evidence to prove that Ta-Nehisi Coates is one the strongest and most important voices out there right now, then here it is."
—Aaron S., Audible Editor
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In the home where Arabella Godwin was raised it is forbidden to speak her name, and her picture is turned to the wall. But in the turbulent America of the 1850s, everyone knows her as "Belle Cora", madam of San Francisco's finest bordello. Judges and senators do her bidding; a vicious newspaper editor plots her downfall; a preacher looks at her from across his pulpit and tries to forget that once she was his wife. Merchant's daughter, farm girl, prostitute, mother - the only thing that never changes is her tireless pursuit of the one man who can see her for who she really is.
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excellent
- By Patricia on 05-15-20
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The Tiger Catcher
- The End of Forever Saga, Book 1
- By: Paullina Simons
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Young and handsome, Julian lives a charmed life in Los Angeles. His world is turned upside down by a love affair with Josephine, a mysterious young woman who takes him by storm. But she is not what she seems, carrying secrets that tear them apart - perhaps forever. So begins Julian and Josephine’s extraordinary adventure of love, loss, and the mystical forces that bind people together across time and space. It is a journey that propels Julian toward either love fulfilled...or oblivion.
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EPIC
- By Ellen on 06-07-19
By: Paullina Simons
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Twelve Years a Slave
- By: Solomon Northup
- Narrated by: Stephen L. Vernon
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Twelve Years a Slave is an account of actual events that took place in the life of Solomon Northup, during the pre-Civil War era of the 1840s. It follows the trials and tribulations of an educated African American man that was born into freedom and later kidnapped, taken away from his family, and forced into slavery.
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What a great book!!!
- By Andrew Robbin on 09-07-14
By: Solomon Northup
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Pale Horse, Pale Rider
- Three Short Novels
- By: Katherine Anne Porter
- Narrated by: Chelsea Stephens
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The classic 1939 collection of three novellas by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author and journalist, including the famous title story set during the influenza epidemic of 1918.
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Some of the most brilliant prose ever written
- By Anonymous User on 03-21-23
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A Different Drummer
- By: William Melvin Kelley
- Narrated by: Jay Smooth
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
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A wonderful and moving story
- By E. on 10-25-19
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The Gilda Stories
- By: Jewelle Gomez
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next 200 years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.
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A Critical and Timely Classic
- By Qasima Wideman on 08-09-19
By: Jewelle Gomez
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The Third Mrs. Galway
- By: Deirdre Sinnott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s 1835 in Utica, New York, and newlywed Helen Galway discovers a secret: Two runaway slaves are hiding in the shack behind her husband’s house. Suddenly, she is at the center of not only the era’s greatest moral dilemma, but her own, as well. Should she be a “good wife” and report the fugitives to her husband? Or will she defy convention and come to their aid? Within her home, Helen is haunted by the previous Mrs. Galway, recently deceased but still an oppressive presence.
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Never thought I'd enjoy a novel so much.
- By HBvideo on 12-01-21
By: Deirdre Sinnott
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My Name Is Resolute
- By: Nancy E. Turner
- Narrated by: Mhairi Morrison
- Length: 25 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The year is 1729, and Resolute Talbot and her siblings are captured by pirates, taken from their family in Jamaica and brought to the New World. Resolute and her sister are sold into slavery in colonial New England and taught the trade of spinning and weaving. When Resolute finds herself alone in Lexington, Massachusetts, she struggles to find her way in a society that is quick to judge a young woman without a family. As the seeds of rebellion against England grow, Resolute is torn between following the rules and breaking free.
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A life well lived!
- By Anonymous User on 06-20-23
By: Nancy E. Turner
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Days Without End
- A Novel
- By: Sebastian Barry
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely 17 years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Wars - against the Sioux and the Yurok - and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language.
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This is about love of two men
- By KEITH on 08-26-17
By: Sebastian Barry
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Welcome to Night Vale
- A Novel
- By: Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor
- Narrated by: Cecil Baldwin, Dylan Marron, Retta, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.
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This is so good, but
- By Christopher on 04-30-16
By: Joseph Fink, and others
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Absalom, Absalom!
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson township in the early 1830s. With a French architect and a band of wild Haitians, he wrung a fabulous plantation out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. Sutpen was a man, Faulker said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him". His tragedy left its impress not only on his contemporaries but also on men who came after, men like Quentin Compson, haunted even into the 20th century by Sutpen's legacy.
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A long, enjoyable listen
- By pilot on 01-08-09
By: William Faulkner
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The Known World
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
- By Daniel on 09-03-04
By: Edward P. Jones
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Black Boy
- By: Richard Wright
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.
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Outstanding
- By Trevin Harvey on 11-11-20
By: Richard Wright
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Rain of Gold
- By: Victor Villaseñor
- Narrated by: Johnny Rey Diaz
- Length: 30 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa's revolution to the days of Prohibition in California.
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Thank you Victor again!
- By cynthia g on 09-24-20
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Creatures of Passage
- By: Morowa Yejidé
- Narrated by: Morowa Yejidé
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, 10-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man".
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This is the one
- By just_watching on 04-27-21
By: Morowa Yejidé
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Freckles
- By: Gene Stratton-Porter
- Narrated by: Susan Iannucci, David Shears, Sarah Bacaller, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Freckles is the only name he has ever known. His right hand is missing at the wrist, and he is haunted by not knowing how it happened. Raised since infancy in a Chicago orphanage, he speaks with a slight Irish accent and sings with a beautiful voice. Now, exhausted after many days of walking, he applies for a job with the Grand Rapids Lumber Company, guarding timber in the Limberlost Swamp from timber thieves. His Swamp Angel declares her love for him and promises that she will find his parents and prove that Freckles comes from "a race of men that have been gentlemen for ages."
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Freckles
- By Bill Collier on 10-17-23
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A Grain of Wheat
- By: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.
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One of Kenya's Great
- By Afro History fan on 07-31-19
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Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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Maisie Dobbs got her start as a maid in an aristocratic London household when she was thirteen. Her employer, suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, soon became her patron, taking the remarkably bright youngster under her wing. Lady Rowan’s friend, Maurice Blanche, often retained as an investigator by the European elite, recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts. The outbreak of war changed everything. Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets out on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive.
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From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.
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A group of cabinet ministers queries a supercomputer containing the minds of the country’s ancestors. A child robot on a dying planet uncovers signs of fragile new life. A descendant of a rain goddess inherits her grandmother’s ability to change her appearance—and perhaps the world. Created in the legacy of the seminal, award-winning anthology series Dark Matter, Africa Risen celebrates the vibrancy, diversity, and reach of African and AfroDiasporic science fiction and fantasy and reaffirms that Africa is not rising—it’s already here.
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A collection of 17 wonderful short stories showing that two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor. The short stories are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!
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Old fashioned romp of stories, some real gems!
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The Hundred Secret Senses
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Story
Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, Olivia — a young woman from San Francisco — finds herself in China. Looking for a way to reconcile her past with dreams for her future, Olivia's American assumptions are shaken by Chinese ghosts, but she also finds reasons to hope.
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BUY THIS VERSION (Release Date 01–03-22)
- By Jessica B Hunter on 10-04-22
By: Amy Tan
What listeners say about The Water Dancer (Oprah’s Book Club)
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christina
- 09-29-19
Powerful in surprising ways!
Of the 30 books I’ve read so far this year, this is my absolute favorite!!!! The method of storytelling lures you in and quickly gets you committed to seeing the resolution of the story/stories represented. I also love the fact that the entire story shared the impact of a strong part of our cultural history to the history of our country. Aaaand I love the imperfections of each character and how each character grows in their own journey.
“To forgive is irrelevant. To forget is death.”
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39 people found this helpful
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- Alexis Kidd
- 07-05-21
Incredible narration and immersive story
The narrator in particular did an incredible job voicing all the characters distinctly and without mocking their gender differences. And I’ve never read a book quite like this from the perspective of someone who is there
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kat
- 10-12-19
Coltrane on paper
This book is groundbreaking. It drives home the insidiousness of denying someone the memory of who their people are, and the ugliness of denying another’s story. One of the best books I’ve ever read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- V. Conner
- 01-28-20
Moments of reflection...
A challenging view of slavery from the eyes of the oppressed and its branding.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Michelle Burns
- 10-13-19
Highly Recommended!
Loved it all! One of the bestbooks I have ever listened to....highly recommend you download and listen now.
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1 person found this helpful
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- TM
- 10-14-19
Devine!
The words, the story, Joe Morton's hypnotic resonance - all are simply delicious! Thank you once again, Ta-Nehisi Coates!
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-17-19
Not what you think!
The beginning will make you think that this story is a little “out there “, but stick with it! One of the best books I’ve ever read! The narrator is also very gifted.
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- Mynx Madness
- 10-29-19
Exceptional and Phenomenal
Held my attention form beginning to end. Had me wanting to follow the story past it's ending. Bravo!
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- Anonymous User
- 02-20-20
An amazing work of art
This book is indispensable to anyone wishing to better understand the frame of reference for African-Americans. And it is beautifully written and narrated. Enjoyed every minute.
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- Changa Bell
- 12-04-19
Phenomenal Read!
I haven't read anything this poetic and prolific since Ellison's, Invisible Man, Hurston's, Their Eyes Are Watching God. This book was pure magic, live and adventure!
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