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Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People Audiobook
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From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand
Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.
Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
© 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
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"Drawing on and extending accounts of Harriet Tubman’s life and memories, Tiya Miles’s Night Flyer situates Tubman as a thinker, dreamer, and doer. An intellectual, physical, and spiritual force embedded in multiple worlds—ecological, geographical, familial, dream, and spiritual—acquiring and acting on knowledge drawn from each of them. Beautifully conceived and written, Night Flyer speaks powerfully of the worlds Tubman navigated and refused, and to our own perilous times."
— Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
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“Night Flyer anchors Harriet Tubman to the faith and ferocity that has made her beloved by generations of Americans. Tiya Miles continues to captivate readers with her luminous prose, her riveting attention to detail, and her continuing genius to bring the past to life. With imaginative engagement, she has offered us a window onto the world inhabited by Tubman and her people, and its crucial legacy for us today.
— Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom -
Transcending the boundaries of literary genre and academic discipline, Miles provides a brilliant meditation on the many worlds of Harriet Tubman—environmental, social, interior. Night Flyer is also a lyrical praise song to Tubman and those Black women preachers who melded religious faith with physical courage to fight for the liberation of Black bodies, minds, and spirits. A stunning achievement.
— Jacqueline Jones, author of No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era -
Miles is one of our greatest living historians and a beautiful writer to boot . . . As in all her work, Miles fleshes out the complexity, humanity, and social and emotional world of her subject.
— The Millions, Most Anticipated -
Miles is one of our greatest living historians and a beautiful writer to boot . . . As in all her work, Miles fleshes out the complexity, humanity, and social and emotional world of her subject.
— The Millions, Most Anticipated -
Miles goes beyond standard biographies by foregrounding two aspects of Tubman’s life that have rarely been analyzed together: her religious faith and her deep understanding of ecology . . . Miles’ thoughtful engagement with Tubman’s contemporaries allows her to place the icon within a proud lineage of Black female mystics and preachers. . . . A truly unique analysis.
— Booklist -
National Book Award winner Miles chronicles and contextualizes Tubman’s work to lead enslaved people to freedom in the North, spotlighting her subject’s spiritual conviction and naturalistic know-how. . . . A notable, discerning contribution to the understanding of an American legend.
— Kirkus -
“Night Flyer anchors Harriet Tubman to the faith and ferocity that has made her beloved by generations of Americans. Tiya Miles continues to captivate readers with her luminous prose, her riveting attention to detail, and her continuing genius to bring the past to life. With imaginative engagement, she has offered us a window onto the world inhabited by Tubman and her people, and its crucial legacy for us today.
— Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom -
Miles is one of our greatest living historians and a beautiful writer to boot . . . As in all her work, Miles fleshes out the complexity, humanity, and social and emotional world of her subject.
— The Millions, Most Anticipated -
“A world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations.
— American Scholar -
Well-researched and endlessly readable, Night Flyer invites readers to experience the many sides of Harriet Tubman, most of which we’ve not fully understood until now. Miles focuses on her mysticism, knowledge of the natural world and boundless dedication to truth and liberation.
— Ms. Magazine (Best Books of June) -
“The lyrical biography we’ll need before Tubman — already more myth than person — begins gracing the $20 bill, starting in 2030.
— The Chicago Tribune -
“A world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations.
— American Scholar -
“In her trademark deeply researched, thoughtful and exquisite prose, Miles successfully avoids popular depictions of Tubman as a superwoman ‘prepackaged’ . . . With Night Flyer, Tiya Miles seems to transmit the weight of her subject’s hand and heart.
— Bookpage (starred review) -
“The lyrical biography we’ll need before Tubman — already more myth than person — begins gracing the $20 bill, starting in 2030.
— The Chicago Tribune“This book finds beauty in history's unanswerable questions. -
“An innovative vision … Through Tiya Miles’ meticulous research and an unwavering focus on Tubman’s humanity, Night Flyer has transformed a fantastical figure from a bygone time into an accessible, modern-day inspiration.
— Atlanta Journal Constitution -
With originality and flair, [Miles] sheds new light on Tubman’s remarkable story by setting her deeply in the context of her faith and within the natural world that offered her shelter and succour. … Miles brings Tubman to vivid and rounded life.
— Financial Times -
“Night Flyer anchors Harriet Tubman to the faith and ferocity that has made her beloved by generations of Americans. Tiya Miles continues to captivate readers with her luminous prose, her riveting attention to detail, and her continuing genius to bring the past to life. With imaginative engagement, she has offered us a window onto the world inhabited by Tubman and her people, and its crucial legacy for us today.
— Catherine Clinton, author of Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom -
[Night Flyer], like All That She Carried, is not an academic study of nineteenth-century Black history but a moving account of Tubman’s intellectual life . . . It reminds us of the redemptive possibilities of patriotism and religious belief, ideologies that today are too often associated with the reactionary rather than the radical.
— The New Yorker -
In Night Flyer, Miles . . . resurrects Tubman’s spiritual life, considering her alongside not only intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass but also Black evangelists of the era. The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see.
— The New Yorker, Best Books of the Week -
In her deep examination of the world in which Tubman lived, Miles winds through the elusive history and the awesome mythology to find a real life figure more extraordinary than we ever knew before.
— CBS Sunday Morning
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About Tiya Miles
Tiya Miles is the author of several multiple award–winning books, including All That She Carried and The Dawn of Detroit, among others. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award and the Hiett Prize in the Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She is professor of history and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
About Janina Edwards
Janina Edwards, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a native of Chicago and a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts acting program. Her 2016 performance of Voice of Freedom was a finalist for the Audie Award.