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Colson Whitehead
Praise for Colson Whitehead:
“It’s a book you want to read rather than one you should read…while still providing the chilling, fleshy pleasures of zombies who lurch, pursue, hunger. . . . One of the best books of the year.” — Esquire on Zone One
“The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” — Walter Kirn, Time on The Intuitionist
“[Whitehead] takes on a multitude of issues with a rich and probing imagination. His reputation is likely to soar.” — Ishmael Reed, The Washington Post Book World on John Henry Days
About The Underground Railroad:
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.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned — Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her — but they manage to find a station and head north.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is not a metaphor — a secret network of tracks and tunnels has been built beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, where both find work in a city that at first seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens — and Ridgeway, the relentless slave-catcher sent to find her, arrives in town. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom.
Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey — Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era. 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.