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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The “underground railroad” didn’t run trains underground–ventilation would have been a major problem. Nice story, but doesn’t jive with reality.
Not sure I liked this one. Parts of it were emotionally difficult to take. It reads like historical fiction, but there is an element of fantasy that made it somewhat confusing.
Very misleading. A couple of members of my bookclub actually thought this was true — as if a steam engine could really run underground!
Imaginative and insightful; it’s a world-view changer. Breaks your heart while it gives you the strength to carry on at the same time. I can’t find words to do it justice.
This was my favorite book of 2017! Fantastic
I met Whitehead the week before his Pulitzer was announced. Even though I had read this book and gave it 5 of 5, I thought he was a snob. Not an observer of life but a bs’er. As I have reflected on the book, he probably does deserve extraordinary acclaim. Some of the characters have become permanent figures in my thoughts.
Just read this book a couple of weeks ago. Thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend this to anyone interested in the period of history.
Heartbreaking, brutal and beautifully written. I had to put it down a number of times just to give myself a break from the brutality of slavery. A difficult read but well worth it.
magical fantasy
Sad commentary about our dark history of slavery
At our book club, we launched into a discussion about the book almost immediately, because it puzzled many of us whether or not the underground railroad simply functioned as a symbol or whether there was an actual, physical underground railroad that operated as depicted by the author – which seems to be fantastically impossible given the physical limitations of getting a locomotive underground and digging out miles and miles of tracks. We compared this book with Uncle Tom’s abin noting the differences between the genders of the authors and the time frame of witing. I won’t give away our conclusions!
Was not realistic at all, very disappointing; almost didn’t finish it.
It was different than what I thought. A good read, but not as historical as I thought the title suggests.
Too disturbing.
Excellent thought provoking book
So well done. So insightful. And so shocking this was our reality such a short time ago.
A truly idiotic piece of silliness.
Some of the descriptions of the violence unleashed on runaway slaves was hard to stomach.
It is so hard to believe that these attitudes existed in the US for so long. Scary as it seems, some still do. However, the fortitude and “gumption” of the people in this novel is just amazing. This is an important part of history we should never forget.
Absolutely wonderful writing. Best book I’ve read in a long time. Our book club enjoyed it too, and we had a good discussion about its various aspects.