The Underground Railroad

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017

National Book Award Winner 2016

Amazon.Com Number One Book of the Year 2016

Number One New York Times Best Seller

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 boxcar 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.

2016, National Book Awards, Winner

2017, Books Are My Bag Readers Awards novel category, Winner

2017, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Short-listed

2017, Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, Long-listed

2018, International Dublin Literary Award, Nominated

2017, Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, Short-listed

2017, The Man Booker Prize, Long-listed

2017, Pulitzer Price for Fiction, Winner

©2016 Colson Whitehead (P)2016 Little Brown Book Group

Critic reviews

It has invaded both my sleeping and waking thoughts . . . Each character feels alive with a singular humanity . . . Whitehead is on a roll, the reviews have been sublime (Bim Adewunmi)

[A] brutal, vital, devastating novel...This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself (Alex Preston)

One of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year . . . Whitehead never exploits his subject matter, and in fact it's the sparseness of the novel that makes it such a punch in the gut (Sarah Shaffi)

An utterly transporting piece of storytelling (Alex Heminsley)

Reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in and stays forever . . . a tour de force (Oprah Winfrey)

Brutal, tender, thrilling and audacious (Naomi Alderman)

The horrors are fact, the railroad is fiction

I had wanted to immerse myself in this story, to learn more about that horrific part of history. The writing is wonderful and immersion was instant and there I was, with Cora, looking in on a world of utter and complete and injustice. I told my wife about it as I was reading it, I told my children about it - and was amazed by the railroad - it sounded so fantastical that something like that had been accomplished in secret - but I was reading a historical novel, wasn't I? Well, I wasn't. It's called magical realism and when you KNOW about it beforehand, it's fantastic. But if you don't, and I didn't, then it is quite jarring.

Long story short, all the horrors in the novel did, one way or another, one place or another, happen. But the eponymous underground railroad is fiction, a device created by the author to get his protagonist to various places and thus allow us to experience a great deal more. It delivers a vast and nightmarish canvas and, beyond the great story, a great deal will be learned. I just wish I had known, beforehand, about the creative liberties (excellent as they are) Whitehead took.

Good reader, poor story

This book is disappointing; I'm baffled at all the media and prizes it received. The characters are two dimensional and inconsistent, the story line is disjointed, and the actual "underground railroad" urban-fantasy (or whatever you call it ) plays a very small role in the book.

If you want to read about slavery in America, I'm sure you will find better books.

PS: nothing wrong with the reader