Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever.

I just finished an advance copy of Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Underground Railroad. 'Nothing, not one thing or activity, can replace the experience of a good read-being transported to a different land, a different realm, through words and language. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood-where greater pain awaits. #1 New York Times Bestseller - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize - Winner of the National Book Award - Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction - Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize One of the Best books of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, HuffPost, Esquire, Minneapolis Star Tribune Look for Whitehead's acclaimed new novel, The Nickel Boys, available now Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.

The underground railroad novel