The Message

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe renowned author returns with a timely book about his journeys to three sites of conflict - Dakar, South Carolina, and Palestine - exploring how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities. ‘An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice’ Oprah Daily***Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but soon found himself grappling with deeper questions about the destructive myths that shape our world. First we join Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in its segregationist statues. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global history, this work from one of our most important writers is about the urgent need to embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths. ***‘Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing’ Booklist‘Coats always writes with purpose . . . These pilgrimages for him, ground his powerful writing about race’ Associated Press

The number one New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me travels the world to explore how the stories we tell - and the ones we don't - shape our realitiesCoates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories - our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking - expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist - and named for Nubian pharaoh - Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in two places at once- a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine