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New edition of Butler's Kindred to be released
Headline is publishing a new edition of Octavia E Butler's "ground-breaking masterpiece" Kindred with a foreword from Ayòbámi Adébáyò.
Butler, who died in 2006, first published Kindred in 1979. It tells a story of time travel, taking a black woman living in 1970s California back to the antebellum South.
Ayòbámi observes in her new foreword that Kindred "defies genre" as a "visceral exploration of power, freedom and responsibility [that] is part feminist dystopia, part stark portrayal of the horrors of slavery, part speculative time-travel narrative".
Ayòbámi will talk about the novel on BBC Radio 4's "Open Book" on Sunday 22nd April.
Frankie Edwards, commissioning editor, said: "Octavia was an incredible writer and true pioneer, and we are immensely privileged to publish her at Headline. Kindred is the most astonishing book. In many ways it’s hard to believe Octavia wrote this story almost forty years ago – this very special novel could not be more relevant in 2018 and it deserves to be discovered by new readers."
The new edition of Kindred will be published in paperback on 3rd May 2018.
