The Message

#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)

FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Electric Lit

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 readers 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.

A Masterpiece

Seminal work and should be required reading. Enough with the Zionist propaganda. Just send Coates the Pulitzer now.

A Necessary Read

Coates’s ability to create a narrative that provokes thought remains as phenomenal and powerful as it has always been.

The most powerful thing you'll read this year.

What a painful, bitter and sweet journey it was to sit and listen to this writer share his heart and insights. Don't just put this book on your to be read list, read it write now.

Spot on!

Leave it to Ta-Nehisi Coates to go into a country for one reason, observe the obvious, and then tell us about it in a way only he can. His understanding of humanity is insightful and as always, his words are poetic. Everyone should read this book, full stop!

Truth and honesty at its best

Very informing unapologetic, The author's only purpose was clearly that the "whole" truth be revealed