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Doubleday
August 2016
On Sale: August 2, 2016
Featuring: Cora; Caesar
320 pages
ISBN: 0385542364
EAN: 9780385542364
Kindle: B01A4ATV0A
Hardcover / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction Drama
The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection From prize-winning, bestselling author 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 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.
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