Chevalier Theatre presents an evening with National Book Award–winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who will discuss his forthcoming first novel, “The Water Dancer,” which is being published in September. In “The Water Dancer,” Coates brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families. Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage — and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child. Hiram, who is gifted with a mysterious power, almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn’t understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North.

Tickets are $45 and include a copy of Coates’s book. They may be purchased through the Chevalier Theatre website/Tickemaster or at the Chevalier Theatre Box Office, which opens two hours before the show.