The Underground Railroad : a novel
(Book)

New York Times Book Review,,August 14, 2016

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection From prize-winning, bestselling author 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 womanhoodwhere 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 plannedCora 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 Whiteheads ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphorengineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesars first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the citys 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 Gullivers Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journeyhers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the preCivil 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 womans ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.