Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography • A Washington Post Notable Book • Finalist for the PEN America Literary Award •One of Smithsonian Magazine‘s Ten Best History Books of the Year • One of AAIHS’s Best Black History Books of 2024

“Though broad strokes of Tubman’s story are widely known, Miles probes deeper, examining her inner life, faith and relationships with other enslaved Black women to paint a deeper, more vibrant portrait of a historical figure whose mythic status can sometimes overshadow her humanity.” –The New York Times

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.

BIO

Tiya Miles is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University, the author of five prizewinning works on the history of slavery and early American race relations, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She was the founder and director of the Michigan-based ECO Girls program, and she is the author of the National Book Award–winning, New York Times bestselling All That She Carried. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

REVIEWS

“Stellar . . . spectacular . . . Night Flyer is a triumph of Black women’s studies, a powerful representation of what Black studies—an interdisciplinary field ranging far wider than history alone — can offer our understanding of the past. Read it to learn about Tubman. Read it to see what Black women’s studies can do.” -- Nell Irvin Painter, The Washington Post

“Groundbreaking…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.” -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“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

“[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

[H]  Penguin Press  /  June 18, 2024

1.42" H x 8.43" L x 5.35" W (1.15 lbs) 336 pages

[P]  Penguin Books  /  June 17, 2025

0.8" H x 8.1" L x 5.4" W (1.14 lbs) 336 pages