The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in): A Novel (Unabridged)
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4.1 • 343 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century
The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You may want to clear your calendar before downloading Colson Whitehead’s novel. Once you start listening, you’ll be desperate to stay by teenager Cora’s side as she navigates her treacherous existence as a hunted fugitive. Whitehead takes a few liberties with history—in his telling, the enslaved people’s secret escape network is a literal railroad built into underground tunnels. But his writing rings so true the book feels like fact. Veteran audiobook narrator Bahni Turpin nails The Underground Railroad’s taut suspense and amazingly vivid storytelling. If you’re looking for a powerful listen, this is it.
Customer Reviews
Amazing
Such a classic!
Amazing Depth
Brilliantly written. Telling all our history is required for our country to heal and mature. This is a profound work that will shake you to the core as a human being.
Highly recommended.
Gross inaccuracies ruin this story
This is a bestseller from an author who’s won a Pulitzer??? The main character (a slave with a brutal and cruel owner) and escapes from a Georgia plantation via “the Underground Railroad” which turns out to be a literal train station and railway system UNDER THE ACTUAL GROUND. Not even kidding. She gets off at a stop in South Carolina and is given a new identity and free papers, and settles into life as a freed black woman in this much more liberal state (um, what?) and then at some point sees a doctor who asks her, “have you considered birth control?” (The term “birth control” was coined in 1914).
How did this compilation of obviously historically incorrect events make it past editors, publishers, etc. all the way into print?