Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this #1 New York Times bestseller chronicles a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp … fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Harlem Shuffle!
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Realistic at times and alternate history at others. A good read.
I liked nothing about this book and have absolutely no idea how it won prizes. It was terrible!
It was ok.
A day to day account.. gripping
In The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead describes the agony and injustice of slavery in horrendous detail. The protagonist is Cora, a third generation slave, whose grandmother made the journey from Africa. Cora’s mother, Mable, was thought to have escaped the Randalls’ plantation, so when her daughter is given the opportunity, she attempts her own journey to freedom on the famous Underground Railroad. The author describes the safe houses used to transport runaway slaves as depots with actual trains running in tunnels beneath them, which is not true, however it is a very clever way to portray the infamous network of people that risked their own lives to help slaves escape their owners. The author also documents doctors and hospitals that carried out experimental medical procedures on escaped slaves, which I have never read about before and found extremely disturbing. Cora makes several trips on the symbolic railroad, and is caught several times by the slave-tracker, Ridgeway, yet manages to survive and make her way west at the end of the book where I hope she found a new life and the freedom she sought.
What starts out as gut wrenching and realistic historical fiction about the horror of slavery in the American South becomes, over the course of the story, a wide-ranging, multi-genre, speculative fiction lesson on the many forms of systemic and institutional racism in America. I couldn’t put this book down and it had me holding my breath right up to the last page. Absolutely stellar.
Moving and educational. Whatever you think you know about slave culture and what they truly experienced is wrong.
Inspired by the characters rescilience
Well written and engaging.
An imaginary depiction of the underground railroad. Not based on truth, but interesting to read.
Good American history
A different and imaginative perspective on a dark period in our history that doesn’t in the least diminish the powerful message. Thought-provoking.
Although I enjoyed the characters, the underlying premise was a bit too much.
I only read this book because of my book club. I found the anti-white bias hard to take, coupled with the fantasy of a tunneled railway for escaping slaves. After reading making sources on the real heroes (Black and White) on the real Underground Railway, this fabrication seemed to me to have a sour political agenda which introduced characters I couldn’t believe in, in situations that were equally preposterous.
Don’t waste your time with this book.
Real world facts about slaves trying to flee their masters during Civil War era.
Very informative and hard to believe heinous events like this actually happene!! Could not put down!
If want to know what the underground railroad was all about this book is for you. This book is filled with so much history told in page gripping style. It tells the story of a young slave and her harrowing escape. The detail in this book is eye-opening about how things really were. The lessons I learned in school aren’t even close to what really was going on but I don’t think I could’ve handled the harsh realities in high school. This is not a book for the timid. I found myself cheering on the main character even when things got ugly. I really enjoyed reading it. I gave 4 out of 5 stars because the ending wasn’t really there for me. I was a little disappointed. This book is that good the ending can be overlooked.
It was a good read. Had to tell a friend it was fictional.
Raw. No matter what you’ve seen— finish it.
Whitehead paints the tragedy and cruelty of slavery in vivid scenes. The reader needs to be aware that it is a re-imagining of the Underground Railroad, answering the question, “What if it had been an actual railroad, running through tunnels?” There are other aspects Whitehead brings in, paralleling the medical experimentation of Auschwitz, which did not exist in the times he depicts. However, as we follow Cora from the misery of the plantation to almost freedom, and see everyone dear to her die, we see a poignant picture of man’s inhumanity to man.