Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ( You have to read them. ) From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur Genius Grant Nebula and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism sexism and white supremacy then and now. I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. Dana s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California 1976 and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus heir to a slaveowner s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates s The Water Dancer Butler takes one of speculative fiction s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality Kindred is controlled and precise ( New York Times ). Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big and I think it s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream. --N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ( Watchmen ) executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields ( The Americans The Patient ) and Darren Aronofsky ( The Whale ). Janicza Bravo ( Zola ) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson Micah Stock Ryan Kwanten and Gayle Rankin.