The Underground Railroad

The National Book Award Winner and #1 New York Times bestseller_x000D_ from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young _x000D_ slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the _x000D_ antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in _x000D_ Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; _x000D_ an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into _x000D_ womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival _x000D_ from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to _x000D_ take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora _x000D_ kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to _x000D_ find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
     In _x000D_ Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere _x000D_ metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and_x000D_ tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is _x000D_ South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the _x000D_ city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black _x000D_ denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is _x000D_ close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing _x000D_ flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
     Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora_x000D_ encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an _x000D_ odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly _x000D_ re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era,_x000D_ his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal _x000D_ importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is_x000D_ at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to _x000D_ escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on _x000D_ the history we all share.