Kindred

The marker you should judge all other time-travelling narratives by." — The Guardian

In 1976, Dana is a modern woman dreaming of a career as a writer. In 1815, she is a woman feared and assumed to be a slave.

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred is a visceral, ground-breaking masterpiece that defies genre, blending science fiction with a harrowing historical reality. The story follows Dana as she is inexplicably plucked from her California home and transported to a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There, she encounters Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, who possesses a mysterious power to summon her across time whenever his life is in danger.

Bound by blood and a terrifying connection, Dana must save Rufus again and again to ensure her own existence in the future. As she spends more time in the past, the lines between her modern identity and the brutal demands of survival begin to blur. This edition features an original foreword by Ayobami Adebayo, offering fresh insight into a novel that remains as gut-wrenching and essential today as the day it was written.