The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner, National Book Award Winner, Oprah's Book Club)

#1 New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner
National Book Award Winner
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, HuffPost, Esquire, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outsider even among her African peers, she stands on the brink of adulthood—where greater pain awaits her. When Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and flees with him. In Colson Whitehead's brilliant conception, the Underground Railroad is not merely a metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from state to state, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar manifestations of her own world at each stop. While Whitehead brilliantly recreates the horrors of the antebellum era, he weaves the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping story of a woman's will to escape the horrors of slavery and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

About Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 2016 and was named one of the ten best books of the year.