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The Underground Railroad
A Historical Fiction Novel by Colson Whitehead
Subgenres:
- American South,
- Literary,
- Alternate History
This book is for you if you're into...
- Alternate history where the Underground Railroad is a literal train
- Harrowing escapes through surreal, shifting versions of America
- Stories blending historical reality with bold, imaginative twists
From Little Stack
Colson Whitehead is a two-time Pulitzer medalist, and both of his winning novels -- The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys - are exceptional. We've gone with the former for this list for its deft and ingenious reimagining of history.
Here, the Underground Railroad, an organised route of secret networks that helped enslaved people flee the country to freedom, is a literal railroad. A group of characters, including the enslaved Cora, fight to escape the South and outrun the slave catchers in the hopes of a better future. Blending allegory, realism, history, and modernity, this book is a 21st-century masterpiece.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Cora is a 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.
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