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Also by Colson Whitehead:

Cool Machine, August 2026
Hardcover
The Underground Railroad, August 2016
Hardcover / e-Book
The Noble Hustle, May 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Zone One, July 2012
Paperback / e-Book
Zone One, October 2011
Hardcover
Sag Harbor: A Novel, May 2009
Hardcover
Apex Hides the Hurt, March 2006
Hardcover
The Intuitionist, January 2000
Trade Size

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
By: Colson Whitehead

Doubleday
August 2016
On Sale: August 2, 2016
Featuring: Cora; Caesar
320 pages
ISBN: 0385542364
EAN: 9780385542364
Kindle: B01A4ATV0A
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

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.

Media Buzz

Good Morning Texas - Buy The Book - September 14, 2016
PBS News Hour - August 3, 2016
CBS This Morning - August 2, 2016