The Underground Railroad A Novel

<b><b><b>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • </b>PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.<br><br><b>One of <i>The New York Times</i>’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A <i>Kirkus Reviews </i>Best Fiction Book of the Century • A <i>Los Angeles Times</i> Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years</b><br><br>The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.</b></b><br><br>Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her 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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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. <i>The Underground Railroad</i> 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.