by Octavia Butler is a modern classic, a powerful science-fiction parable of the way that the trauma of slavery in American history remains painfully present. Dana, a Black woman living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, is transported back through time to the antebellum South, to a plantation in Maryland. Her repeated journeys into the past occur whenever her white, slave-owning ancestor, Rufus, is in danger--and thus her own existence in the future is at stake. The novel is raw and at times uncomfortable to read, but the themes and ideas are searing and indelible.