Kindred

Butler's best-selling novel Kindred explores what would happen if a woman with 20th-century sensibility was transported back to an antebellum plantation. Dana is a black woman writer in the 1970s. As she's celebrating her birthday with her new husband, she is transported back in time to the antebellum South. There Dana saves a drowning white man, Rufus, son of the plantation owner, where she finds herself enslaved. She realized that she was summoned through time to save him, and it happens again and again, each time transport getting harder and longer as she tries to protect her ancestral line to save herself.

Doubleday published the first edition of Kindred in 1979. Jacket illustration by Larry Schwinger. First editions are scarce, and have ‘First Edition’ printed on the copyright page.