The Underground Railroad

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES BY BARRY JENKINS (COMING MAY 2021)

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016

'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian

'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer

'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year'
Stylist

'Dazzling' New York Review of Books


Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction 2017.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a
hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even
among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear
even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia,
tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to
escape to the North.

In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground
Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along
subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it
can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially
seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed
for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless
slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee
again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true
freedom.

At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead
brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War
era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal
importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The
Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to
escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on
history.