The Message

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“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. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out 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.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes listeners along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

©2024 Ta-Nehisi Coates (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.”—BookPage, starred review

“The Message charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual . . . The rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder edged. But a sense of shock also seems to have elicited in Coates a sense of possibility . . . [Coates] is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose, so naming his latest collection The Message is nothing if not on-brand. But what’s the actual message? Consisting of three pieces of non-fiction, the book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part writing primer . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice, and of the power of writing to render a more compassionate—and more honest—future . . . At once a rallying cry and a love letter to writing itself, the book is an urgent reminder that ‘politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.’”—Oprah Daily