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Kindred
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Kindred Paperback - 2004

by Octavia Butler

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This 25th anniversary edition, about a modern black woman who is snatched away to the antebellum South, celebrates a classic work with "much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now" ("Los Angeles Herald Examiner").

About this book

Butler's best-selling novel Kindred explores what would happen if a woman with 20th-century sensibility was transported back to an antebellum plantation. Dana is a black woman writer in the 1970s. As she's celebrating her birthday with her new husband, she is transported back in time to the antebellum South. There Dana saves a drowning white man, Rufus, son of the plantation owner, where she finds herself enslaved. She realized that she was summoned through time to save him, and it happens again and again, each time transport getting harder and longer as she tries to protect her ancestral line to save herself.

 

Summary

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Reader reviews for Kindred

From the publisher

One of the 100 best novels ever published in English (The Guardian), most consequential novels of the past 100 years (The Atlantic), most essential books published in the U.S. since 1776 (Publishers Weekly)

Experience the novel that redefined American literature by the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower, MacArthur "Genius," and Nebula and Hugo award winner

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana's 26th birthday celebration ends when she's ripped from 1976 California and thrust onto a Maryland slave plantation in 1815. Her mission: keep alive the white boy who will grow up to assault her ancestor--because without him, she'll never be born.

Every trip back grows more dangerous. Dana feels the lash, wears the chains, endures the daily terror that defined millions of lives. She can't just read about slavery's horrors--she lives them, bleeds from them, nearly breaks under them.

Butler doesn't let you observe from a safe distance. You're trapped in Dana's skin as she navigates impossible choices: submit to survive, or resist and risk everything. You'll feel her desperation as she fights to preserve her humanity while the plantation's brutality threatens to consume her.

This isn't historical fiction--it's time travel that cuts straight to the bone of American racism. Butler pioneered the neo-slavery narrative that inspired Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Water Dancer. But Kindred remains unmatched in its raw power to make slavery's legacy feel immediate, personal, and inescapable.

You'll finish this book changed. Dana's story will lodge itself in your chest and refuse to leave. You'll understand, in ways textbooks never taught you, how the past lives in our present--and why that matters more than ever.

"Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise" (New York Times).

"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

This book has been published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the cover available.

First edition identification

Doubleday published the first edition of Kindred in 1979. Jacket illustration by Larry Schwinger. First editions are scarce, and have ‘First Edition’ printed on the copyright page.

Details

  • Title Kindred
  • Author Octavia Butler
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition [ Edition: Repri
  • Pages 287
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, U.s.a. Bruce Springsteen
  • Publication date 2004-02-01
  • Features Bibliography, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780807083697 / 0807083690
  • Weight 0.66 lbs (0.30 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.01 x 5.3 x 0.8 in (20.35 x 13.46 x 2.03 cm)
  • Reading level 580
  • Themes
    • Cultural Region: Southern California
    • Cultural Region: Western U.S.
    • Cultural Region: West Coast
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Geographic Orientation: California
    • Locality: Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA
    • Sex & Gender: Feminine
  • Category Fiction - Science Fiction
  • Library of Congress subjects Los Angeles (Calif.), Science fiction
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2003062862
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Media reviews

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

"One cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now." —Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

"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

"Truly terrifying . . . A book you'll find hard to put down."—Essence

"Butler's books are exceptional . . . She is a realist, writing the most detailed social criticism and creating some of the most fascinating female characters in the genre . . . real women caught in impossible situations."—Dorothy Allison, Village Voice

"Butler's literary craftsmanship is superb."—Washington Post Book World

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

"No other work of fantasy or science fiction writings brings the intimate environment of the antebellum South to life better than Octavia E. Butler's Kindred." —Kevin Weston, San Francisco Chronicle

"A celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture; some colleges require it as mandatory freshman reading." —Linell Smith, The Baltimore Sun

"Kindred is as much a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction. . .a work of art whose individual accomplishment defies categorization." —Barbara Strickland, The Austin Chronicle

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

"Her books are disturbing, unsettling… In a field dominated by white male authors, Butler's African-American feminist perspective is unique, and uniquely suited to reshape the boundaries of the sci-fi genre." —Bill Glass, L. A. Style

Citations

  • Ebony, 04/01/2004, Page 26

About the author

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the author of many novels, including Dawn, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Nebula Award, and she twice won the Hugo Award.

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Kindred
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Kindred

by Octavia Butler

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Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

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