The Underground Railroad: a novel - Hardcover

Whitehead, Colson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385542364 ISBN 13: 9780385542364

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Award
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Longlisted for the Prix Medicis

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 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.

About this title

Review

"Nothing, not one thing or activity, can replace the experience of a good read--being transported to a different land, a different realm, through words and language. I just finished an advance copy of Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Underground Railroad. Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever. This is one. It's a tour de force, and I don't say that lightly."
-- Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine

"Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels playing fast and loose with 'real life, ' both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet. . . . Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies...and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank."
--Kirkus (starred review)

"[A] magnetizing and wrenching saga. . . . Hard-driving, laser-sharp, artistically superlative, and deeply compassionate, Whitehead's unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation."
--Booklist (starred review)

"[S]pellbinding and ferocious.... The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Hardcover edition.

"Terrific." --Barack Obama

"An American masterpiece." --NPR

"Stunningly daring." --The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph." --The Washington Post

"Potent. . . . Devastating. . . . Essential." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Whitehead's best work and an important American novel." --The Boston Globe

"Electrifying. . . . Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember." --People

"Heart-stopping." --Oprah Winfrey

"The Underground Railroad is inquiring into the very soul of American democracy. . . . A stirring exploration of theAmerican experiment." --The Wall Street Journal

"A brilliant reimagining of antebellum America."--The New Republic

"Colson Whitehead's book blends the fanciful and the horrific, the deeply emotional and the coolly intellectual. Whathe comes up with is an American masterpiece."--Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

"The Underground Railroad enters the pantheon of . . . the Great American Novels. . . . A wonderful reminder of whatgreat literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challengeus, and leave us changed by the end." --Esquire

"[Whitehead] is the best living American novelist."--Chicago Tribune

"Masterful, urgent. . . . One of the finest novels written aboutour country's still unabsolved original sin." --USA Today

"Brilliant. . . . An instant classic that makes vivid the darkest, most horrific corners of America's history of brutality against black people." --HuffPost

"Singular, utterly riveting. . . . You'll be shaken and stunned by Whitehead's imaginative brilliance. . . . The Underground Railroad is a book both timeless and timely. It is a book for now; it is a book that is necessary." --BuzzFeed

"Whitehead is a writer of extraordinary stylistic powers. . . . [The Underground Railroad] offers many testaments to Whitehead's considerable talents and examines a deeply relevant and disturbing period of American history."--The Christian Science Monitor

"[An] ingenious novel. . . . A successful amalgam: a realistically imagined slave narrative and a crafty allegory; a tense adventure tale and a meditation on America's defining values." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Whitehead's novel unflinchingly turns our attention to the foundations of the America we know now." --Elle

"Perfectly balances the realism of its subject with fabulist touches that render it freshly illuminating." --Time

"I haven't been as simultaneously moved and entertained bya book for many years. This is a luminous, furious, wildly inventive tale that not only shines a bright light on one of the darkest periods of history, but also opens up thrilling new vistas for the form of the novel itself."--Alex Preston, The Guardian

Book Description

From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent, wrenching, thrilling tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0385542364
• ISBN 13: 9780385542364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320