PublishedSphere, April 2017 |
ISBN9780708898406 |
FormatSoftcover, 400 pages |
Dimensions19.6cm × 12.7cm × 2.6cm |
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016
AMAZON.COM #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian
'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer
'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist
'Dazzling' New York Review of Books
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates 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 the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
Winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Before the American Civil War, there was a network of secret routes and safe houses used to funnel African-American slaves out of slave states and into free states, or even to Canada. This was called the Underground Railroad. Colson Whitehead’s novel is rewrites history, turning a metaphorical underground railroad into a literal and actual slave-run subway. Loaded with tension as it tells the story of two slaves making a desperate break for freedom, on the run from a terrifying slave-catcher, it also manages to be a remarkably powerful, sensitive and moving novel. It’s very clear why Underground Railroad has garnered the acclaim it has.
