Ta-Nehisi Coates's debut novel is a work of historical fiction with a fantastic element, set on and around Lockless, a declining Virginia tobacco plantation. Hiram Walker, born enslaved to the plantation's owner, has a photographic memory for everything except his mother, Rose, who was sold away and whose loss he cannot recall. After a carriage crash in a river nearly drowns him — his white half-brother dies, while Hiram is carried to safety by a mysterious blue light — he discovers "conduction," a power to travel great distances through memory and storytelling, the same power Harriet Tubman is said to hold in the novel's Underground network. Recruited into that secret war against slavery, Hiram works to master conduction not for the cause alone but to return and free Thena and Sophia, the family he left behind. The novel turns the Underground Railroad into a story about memory itself: freedom, Coates argues, requires remembering what slavery worked to erase.
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates · Original publisher: One World (New York), 2019
