The Underground Railroad

Author: Colson Whitehead

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 29.99 AUD
  • : 9780708898376
  • : Little, Brown Book Group Limited
  • : Fleet
  • :
  • : 0.456
  • : September 2015
  • : 235mm X 158mm X 27mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 32.99
  • : August 2016
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Colson Whitehead
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  • : Paperback
  • : 916
  • :
  • : en
  • : 813/.54
  • :
  • :
  • : 352
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Barcode 9780708898376
9780708898376

Description

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her - but they manage to find a station and head north. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is not a metaphor - a secret network of tracks and tunnels has been built beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, where both find work in a city that at first seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens - and Ridgeway, the relentless slave-catcher sent to find her, arrives in town. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era. 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.

Promotion info

Winner Pulitzer Prize 2017

Awards

Winner of National Book Awards: Fiction 2016. Long-listed for Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2017.

Reviews

In powerful, precise prose, at once spellbinding and ferocious, the book follows Cora's incredible journey north, step by step ... the story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen Publishers Weekly Startlingly original ... Whitehead continues the African-AMerican artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing authority and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank Kirkus

Author description

Colson Whitehead is the New York Times bestselling author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.