The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in): A Novel (Unabridged) The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in): A Novel (Unabridged)

The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in): A Novel (Unabridged‪)‬

    • 4.1 • 330 Ratings
    • $14.99

    • $14.99

Publisher Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Now an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates 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 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.

Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

GENRE
Fiction
NARRATOR
BT
Bahni Turpin
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
10:43
hr min
RELEASED
2016
August 2
PUBLISHER
Random House Audio
SIZE
660.3
MB

Customer Reviews

Farmerkirt ,

Amazing Depth

Brilliantly written. Telling all our history is required for our country to heal and mature. This is a profound work that will shake you to the core as a human being.
Highly recommended.

I rated it!  ,

Gross inaccuracies ruin this story

This is a bestseller from an author who’s won a Pulitzer??? The main character (a slave with a brutal and cruel owner) and escapes from a Georgia plantation via “the Underground Railroad” which turns out to be a literal train station and railway system UNDER THE ACTUAL GROUND. Not even kidding. She gets off at a stop in South Carolina and is given a new identity and free papers, and settles into life as a freed black woman in this much more liberal state (um, what?) and then at some point sees a doctor who asks her, “have you considered birth control?” (The term “birth control” was coined in 1914).
How did this compilation of obviously historically incorrect events make it past editors, publishers, etc. all the way into print?

N.A.I.L. ,

Great Book but the track needs fixing

Overall great book but the problem I have is how the audiobook doesn’t divide each chapter.

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