Sign in
Books
Kids
Popular
Authors & Events
Gifts & Deals
Audio
Sign In
Look Inside | Reading Guide
May 04, 2021 | ISBN 9780593314760 Buy
Also available from:
May 04, 2021 | ISBN 9780593314760
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, National Book Award-winning, Oprah-anointed, #1 New York Times bestselling novel that explores America’s troubled racial past as only he can—soon to be an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. 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 even 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 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 strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates 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, Harlem Shuffle, coming this September!
Reading Guide
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year… More about Colson Whitehead
“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 the American 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. What he 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 what great literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challenge us, 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 by a 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.”—The Guardian
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction WINNER 2017
Arthur C. Clarke Award WINNER 2017
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize WINNER 2017
National Book Award WINNER 2016
New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year WINNER 2016
Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) WINNER 2017
Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction FINALIST 2017
Man Booker Prize for Fiction LONGLIST 2017
Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network
Stay in Touch
By clicking Sign Up, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
