ONE WORLD / AUTHOR PHOTO BY GABRIELLA DEMCZUK
Ta-Nehisi Coates plays to his strengths with The Water Dancer, his first foray into narrative fiction. He sets the story in a time and place he knows well: pre-Civil War America. It’s a period of our country’s history that he’s explored in much of his writing, particularly the bracing essay “The Case for Reparations” for the Atlantic. And he addressed it in his National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me, using it as a jumping-off point to delve into the continued degradation of Black people by modern institutions and citizens.