For Your Reading List

When I found out Ta-Nehisi Coates was gearing up to debut his first work of fiction, I counted down the days until its release. Well, 400-plus pages later and I'm completely hooked. At its core, The Water Dancer is a coming-of-age story about Hiram — a young man with photographic memory who was born into slavery — and his personal journey of self-discovery and freedom. He's the son of a white plantation owner and an enslaved black woman, who his father ultimately sold away. In a community divided into three class systems — Tasked (black slaves), Quality (white landowners), and Low-class whites — we follow Hiram as he dissects the true meaning of "family" and why kin doesn't always equate to bloodlines.

Along this exploration, Hiram is introduced to water dancing and the power of conduction, which not only brings him closer to his roots, but also distances himself from a life he once knew.

While I found myself getting attached to the complicated characters, it's the story that consumed me. With every turn of the page, Coates found a way to beautifully illustrate the vile realities of slavery, the price of freedom, and the valorous measure people will go to to protect the ones they love. Get your copy now. — Morgan Murrell

BuzzFeed Book Club: Behind the Book

This month, BuzzFeed Book Club is reading Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson. We asked Wilson to tell us how this book — which follows a disillusioned 20-something who becomes nanny to twins who happen to regularly burst into flames — came to be. Here's what he had to say:

It feels strange to say that this book started with my lifelong obsession with spontaneous human combustion, but there it is. As a kid, I was mesmerized by the phenomenon. A week hasn't gone by since then where I don't think about it, the images so easy in my brain even as they frighten me. But all those people who combusted died, which I hated. I wanted something better. I wanted to survive it.

My wife and I have two kids, and I realized how raising them oftentimes felt like handling children who really could burst into flames at any moment, their emotions always so heightened, right on the surface. The conceit became a way for me to explore the danger of caring for anything, of hoping that you might protect them from the world when you feel incapable of protecting even yourself.

So that’s how the book started, children on fire. But I knew that thekids couldn’t do all the work. They were too busy bursting into flames. So I looked at Lillian, the woman tasked with taking care of these fire children. The moment I started writing in her voice, everything about the novel fell into place. I always write about family, about home, about the strange ways that we come together, and Lillian was this interesting character for me because she’d never had a family, really. She’d never felt any affection for home. She’d never had much opportunity to be around other people. So it was a way for my obsessions to feel new to me, to watch her figure out these issues and, in turn, help me figure them out in new ways.

Read along with BuzzFeed Book Club.