Find out more about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message – an intimate exploration of extreme injustice
More about the book!

The Message by acclaimed journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates is out now from Penguin Random House SA!
From Senegal to South Carolina and Palestine, Coates visits three prominent sites of conflict in an attempt to untangle the dangerous myths that drive people and nations to violence.
Explore how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities.
‘Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing.’ – Booklist
‘Coats always writes with purpose … These pilgrimages for him, ground his powerful writing about race.’ – Associated Press
About the book
In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us.
The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
About the author
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University in the English department.
Categories International Non-fiction
Tags New books New releases Penguin Random House SA Ta-Nehisi Coates The Message
Related
- Life’s messiest moments make the best stories – find out more about Jojo Moyes new novel We All Live Here
- Join acclaimed author Penny Haw in Elgin for the launch of her new historical novel Follow Me to Africa (4 Mar)
- NEW from Elizabeth Gilbert! All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation
- New book alert! I Am Tshiamo: My Transition to Self-acceptance and Womanhood by Tshiamo Modisane
- Don’t miss a poetry reading featuring Sanah Ahsan, winner of the Outspoken Performance Poetry Prize (6 Feb)