Events › Club Book With Nathan Harris

Literary wunderkind Nathan Harris is the author behind the instant New York Times bestseller The Sweetness of Water (2021), “a historical page-turner about social friction so powerful it ignites a whole town” (NPR). Set in the waning days of the U.S. Civil War and turbulent aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, Harris’s debut follows the unlikely partnership and budding friendship between eccentric homesteader George Walker and newly freed Prentiss and Landry. The Sweetness of Water became an Oprah’s Book Club selection and was longlisted for both the Mann Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction – a rare of honors for any writer, particularly a first-time author still in his twenties. Harris’s anticipated follow-up returns to the Reconstruction era and a South determined to return its Black citizens to bondage. In Amity, Louisiana freedman Coleman treks to Mexico in pursuit of his sister and their former enslaver. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews commends Amity as “a smartly imagined Western with a different sort of hero… with twists and turns from beginning to end.”

Collaborator: MELSA (Metropolitan Library Service Agency). This program is funded with money from Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.