The Underground Railroad
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
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4.1 • 224 Ratings
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES BY BARRY JENKINS (COMING MAY 2021)
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2017
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016
'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian
'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer
'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist
'Dazzling' New York Review of Books
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017.
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 box car 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You may want to clear your calendar before downloading Colson Whitehead’s novel. Once you start reading, you’ll be desperate to stay by teenager Cora’s side as she navigates her treacherous existence as a hunted fugitive in 19th-century America. Whitehead takes a few liberties with history—in his telling, the slaves’ secret escape network is a literal railroad built into underground tunnels. But his writing rings so true the book feels like fact. With its taut suspense and amazingly vivid storytelling, The Underground Railroad is even more powerful than Twelve Years a Slave in its unflinching depiction of America’s “peculiar institution”.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Each thing had a value... In America the quirk was that people were things." So observes Ajarry, taken from Africa as a girl in the mid-18th century to be sold and resold and sold again. She finally arrives at the vicious Georgia plantation where she dies at the book's outset. After a lifetime in brutal, humiliating transit, Ajarry was determined to stay put in Georgia, and so is her granddaughter, Cora. That changes when Cora is raped and beaten by the plantation's owner, and she resolves to escape. In powerful, precise prose, at once spellbinding and ferocious, the book follows Cora's incredible journey north, step by step. In Whitehead's rendering, the Underground Railroad of the early 19th century is a literal subterranean tunnel with tracks, trains, and conductors, ferrying runaways into darkness and, occasionally, into light. Interspersed throughout the central narrative of Cora's flight are short chapters expanding on some of the lives of those she encounters. These include brief portraits of the slave catcher who hunts her, a doctor who examines her in South Carolina, and her mother, whose escape from the plantation when Cora was a girl has both haunted and galvanized her. Throughout the book, Cora faces unthinkable horrors, and her survival depends entirely on her resilience. The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen.
Customer Reviews
Let down by the ending.
Interesting read but doesn’t really go anywhere, the ending leaves you hanging , it feels a little unfinished.
Nothing new
I felt the book was slow to start and then rushed to conclusion. I could not imagine the Farm and thought the descriptive lacking in these chapters. I give it 2 stars as I felt lost halfway. I will re-read to clarify.
Overblown
A worthy topic but this book adds little to our understanding of an awful period in American history. The narrative starts of strong but by the second half of the book it's losing steam and I felt that the engine of the narrators tale had ground to a disappointing halt long before the book finishes.