The Water Dancer is the debut novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published on September 24, 2019, by Random House under its One World imprint.

It is a surrealist story set in the pre-Civil War South, concerning a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses a photographic memory, but who cannot remember his mother.

[3] The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club.

At the end of The Water Dancer, Coates adds an author's note, listing Peter and William Still as the inspiration for the characters in the White family.

Coates cited Doctorow's novels Ragtime (1975) and Billy Bathgate (1989) as early influences and recalled later reading The Waterworks.

"[10][11][12] Publishers Weekly gave the novel a rave review, writing, "In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation's most important writers, tackling one of America's oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness.

"[14] Dwight Garner of The New York Times gave the novel a positive review, calling it "a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.

[16] Constance Grady of Vox praised the "clarity of Coates's ideas and the poetry of his language" but largely panned the novel as a "mess" with monotonous characters and lacking a strong plot development to make up for it.

[17] Shah Tazrian Ashrafi of The Daily Star, while complimenting its "lyrical prose", felt that the novel "left [him] craving more action and high-geared moments of grief, suspense, climax, and character development.