Ta-Nehisi Coates is a 45 year old journalist and author and this is his first book. He has just published a brilliant first novel – The Water Dancer. The style is light, ironic at times also deeply moving at times - but never strident or lecturing. It is personal, intimate and revealing. He writes about growing up an African American man in Baltimore, the brutal location for the fabulous series ‘The Wire’. The book reveals a lot about African American urban America, the crack epidemic, fathers and sons, the difficulty of African American manhood and the role of the women in the family. Countless awards as well as a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant.