Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A powerful and profound meditation on the horrors of American slavery, Butler’s time-travel classic is haunting, thought-provoking and one of the greatest works of speculative fiction ever written. This gorgeous new gift edition includes a stunning new cover design as well as a foil-embossed spine and colored endpapers.

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.")

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807006924
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	136,401
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) is the New York Times best-selling author of many novels, including Dawn, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. She was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, a PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award, 2 Nebula Awards, and 3 Hugo Awards, among others.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The River

The Fire

The Fall

The Fight

The Storm

The Rope

Epilogue

Reader’s Guide
Critical Essay
Discussion Questions

Editorial Reviews

A marvel of imagination, empathy and detail.”
—Stephen Kearse, New York Times

“This powerful novel about a modern black woman transported back in time to a slave plantation in the antebellum South is the perfect introduction to Butler’s work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction. . . . A harrowing, haunting story.”
—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Sixteen years after Butler’s death, her legacy of fierce imagination feels more relevant than ever. With Kindred illuminating so much of the most compelling speculative fiction, the book stands as an icon for recasting today’s challenges—envisioning new role models and possibilities in the process.”
—Sheree Renée Thomas, Scientific American

“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.”
—N. K. Jemisin

“Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again.”
—Harlan Ellison

“In Kindred, Octavia Butler creates a road for the impossible and a balm for the unbearable. It is everything the literature of science fiction can be.”
—Walter Mosley

“One of the most original, thought-provoking works examining race and identity.”
—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

“A startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery.”
—Sherley Anne Williams, Ms.

From the Publisher

Using the techniques of science fiction, Octavia Butler in Kindred tangles in a startlingly unique and imaginative way with some of the most fundamental questions about slavery: How does one become mentally enslaved? What is the nature of the slave-master relationship? What is the relevance of slavery to modern-day descendants of slaves?

Dana Franklin, a black woman writer, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976 when she is snatched from her Southern California home and transported to the bank of a river in the antebellum South where she saves the life of a young white child who appears to be drowning. When the child's parents arrive, they begin to beat Dana; when the child's father attempts to shoot her, she is transported back to the twentieth century. The child is Rufus Weylin, whom Dana later discovers is to be the father of one of her ancestors, a child born of Weylin's rape of Alice Greenwood, one of his slaves. Thus, the preservation of his life is critical to Dana's survival. She is transported to the nineteenth century whenever his life is in danger, and she returns to the twentieth century whenever her life is in danger.

She begins to develop an attachment to Rufus; in every life-saving encounter with him, she attempts to teach him not to fall into the racism endemic in his family and southern society. In essence, she tries to save both his body and his soul. But her trips back in time are too infrequent to have any lasting effect on Weylin, who buys into the racist and sexist system that surrounds him. Dana takes an interest in the Weylin slaves, particularly Alice, and uses her literacy and knowledge of modern medical skills to help them. But in order to guarantee her own existence in the future, she also must encourage Alice to have sex with Rufus. Eventually, Dana too is made a slave and forced into an intimate understanding of the horrors of slavery and her own limitations.

The tension of the oddly symbiotic relationship between Dana and Weylin makes this book a riveting read. By transporting a modern-day African American woman into slavery, Butler vividly brings to life the hardships endured by the slaves. Dana frequently compares her strength and survival skills to those of the enslaved women and finds herself wanting. In the end, Dana finds the strength to break free of her physical slavery and the hold that the past has on her, while ensuring her own survival in the present, but she can never again forget the struggles of her exploited ancestors.

Sacred Life

Being transported in time to the antebellum South would hardly be the first choice of a young black woman of the 1970s--even if it's to save the life of the slaveholder who otherwise might never grow up to be her ancestor. This may seem farfetched to some, but it provides the framework for a poignant and thought-provoking novel about slavery, survival and human nature. Kim Staunton removes any sense of strangeness for the reader and moves skillfully between the time periods as this unusual time-link continues. Her use of accents not only directs the listener through the changing settings, but also showcases the dynamic attitudes and emotions of the characters and their relationships with each other and the shifting social contexts in which they find themselves. J.E.M. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 99 - AudioFile