Kindred

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

Selected by The Atlantic as one of the "most consequential novels of the past 100 years"

"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.

The graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's bestselling dystopian science-fiction masterpiece Kindred is a #1 New York Times bestseller and the winner of the Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium.

Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.

Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day.

Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler's mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.

Butler's most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young Black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre-Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a Southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana's own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.

Beloved as an essential work in feminist, science fiction, and fantasy genres, as well as a cornerstone of the Afrofuturism movement, the intersectionality of race, history, and the treatment of women addressed in the book are critical topics in contemporary dialogue, both in the classroom and in the public sphere.