The Underground Railroad - Hardcover

"[S]pellbinding and ferocious.... The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen."
--"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)"

"Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels playing fast and loose with 'real life, ' both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet. . . . Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank."
--"Kirkus "(starred review)
"[S]pellbinding and ferocious.... The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen."
--"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)"

"Nothing, not one thing or activity, can replace the experience of a good read being transported to a different land, a different realm, through words and language. I just finished an advance copy of Colson Whitehead's new novel, "The Underground Railroad." Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever. This is one. It's a tour de force, and I don't say that lightly."
Oprah Winfrey, "O Magazine"
"Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels playing fast and loose with 'real life, ' both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet. . . . Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank."
--"Kirkus "(starred review)
"[A] magnetizing and wrenching saga. . . .Hard-driving, laser-sharp, artistically superlative, and deeply compassionate, Whitehead s unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation."
--"Booklist"(starred review)
"[S]pellbinding and ferocious.... The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen."
--"Publishers Weekly "(starred review)"

From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent, wrenching, thrilling tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned — Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her — but they manage to find a station and head north.

In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is not a metaphor — a secret network of tracks and tunnels has been built beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, where both find work in a city that at first seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens — and Ridgeway, the relentless slave-catcher sent to find her, arrives in town. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom.

Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey — Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era.The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.