Kindred

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. (“You have to read them.”) From the New York Times best-selling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” So begins the prologue of Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s best-selling neo-slavery novel set against the backdrop of 1976 California and early 1800s Maryland. When 26-year-old Dana vanishes from her home and is transported to the antebellum South, she soon realizes why she was summoned to the past: to protect Rufus, the son of the slave-owning plantation family, and ensure his safety so that he may live into young adulthood. It isn’t until after Dana endures multiple trips that she learns the truth of their relationship and how her very existence in her own time is dependent on helping Rufus survive in his. These increasingly long and perilous trips not only force Dana as a modern-day Black woman to experience and accept the savagery of her own slavery in the 1800s but also pull her further away from her autonomy and her return to the present. Kindred was adapted and developed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as a limited FX original series on Hulu. This edition includes a foreword by Janelle Monáe, acclaimed singer/songwriter, actor, producer, and storyteller.