Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award the #1 New York Times bestseller from
Colson Whitehead a magnificent 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 hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora an outcast
even among her fellow Africans she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits.
When Caesar a recent arrival from Virginia tells her about the Underground Railroad they
decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young
white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north they
are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception the Underground Railroad is no mere
metaphor-engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the
Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina in a city that initially seems
like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black
denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway the relentless slave catcher is close on their heels.
Forced to flee again Cora embarks on a harrowing flight state by state seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of
her journey-hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly
re-creates 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 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.
