The New York Times’ best-selling novel and Oprah’s Book Club pick, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is being adapted to film.
Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment (an Oscar winning production label) and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films (which produced of 2009 film, Precious, based on the novel, Push by Sapphire) have joined forced with MGM to bring The Water Dancer’s literary magic to the big screen.
Below reads the publisher’s description of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel:
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Casting and production of The Water Dancer is still in progress, however you can also watch the adaptation for Coates’ novel Between the World and Me (available on HBO on November 21st) while you wait!
feature image via shadow and act