Kate’s breast cancer along with the realization that her life was a lie motivates Bea to search for the truth about her birth parents. Torn between her responsibilities to her ill mother and a desperate need to understand why Kate stole her as a baby, she packs her car and drives north to Kate’s last-known address in Southern Illinois. Far away from everything she knows, she introduces herself to the group of strangers who are her birth family....

This first volume in the Library of America edition of Octavia E. Butler's collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre-Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that...