Kindred

By Octavia Butler

Foreword by Tomi Adeyemi

Published by Beacon Press, 2023

302 pages, paperback

From the publisher:

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

So begins the prologue of Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s best-selling neo-slavery novel set against the backdrop of 1976 California and early 1800s Maryland.

When 26-year-old Dana vanishes from her home and is transported to the antebellum South, she soon realizes why she was summoned to the past: to protect Rufus, the son of the slave-owning plantation family, and ensure his safety so that he may live into young adulthood. It isn’t until after Dana endures multiple trips that she learns the truth of their relationship and how her very existence in her own time is dependent on helping Rufus survive in his. These increasingly long and perilous trips not only force Dana as a modern-day Black woman to experience and accept the savagery of her own slavery in the 1800s but also pull her further away from her autonomy and her return to the present.