Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New
York Times bestseller from 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. Now an original Amazon Prime
Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.
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 womanhood--where 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 planned--Cora 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 Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere
metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks
and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is
South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the
city's 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 Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different
worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as
well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates 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 a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to
escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on
the history we all share.
Look for Colson Whitehead's best-selling new novel, Harlem
Shuffle!
