Ask a Bookseller: ‘The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain’ by Sofia Samatar

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.For the next few weeks on Ask a Bookseller, we’ll be doing something a little different: focusing on books of hope. Danielle King of Left Bank Books in St Louis, Mo., knew right away what she wanted to recommend: Sofia Samatar’s sci-fi novel “The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain.” Weighing in at 128 pages, this short novel packs a transformational punch. The setting for this novel is the stars, where humanity lives, powered by an enslaved underclass, the Chained. The story focuses on a boy who is pulled from the Chained class and given an elite education, and his life is transformed by connections with two people in succession: a man called the Prophet and a woman (formerly Chained, herself) called the Professor. Danielle King describes the story as: A transformation of the connection between people that are socially structured to be apart from each other. These people have so much in common, but they’re kept from one another, and when they finally can come together, it is one of the most uplifting stories I’d ever seen.  Fun fact, I was training to be a political philosopher before I became a bookseller. I used to study racial group consciousness, and I’ve read a lot of books about racial group consciousness. In this little, tiny science fiction tone, Sophia Samatar did what thousands of race scholars have been unable to do — which is talk about the way racial group consciousness affects the people in that group, really accurately, really beautifully, and in a way that makes you feel like the way that the world is needn't be the way that the world is, because every day we have this opportunity to connect to one another, and in that connection, be transformed.— Danielle King