The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in): A Novel
Colson Whitehead
Aug 2016 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Bahni Turpin
4.7star
21 reviewsreport
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10 hr 43 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century
The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.
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.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century
The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.
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.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!
Ratings and reviews
4.7
21 reviews
Nikitta43
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December 2, 2018
Good book. Although fiction, it does shed some light on what slaves endured and the mindset of people. It doesn't sugarcoat it like the history books.
Mark Mintz
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January 28, 2018
Audiobook was well-produced. I felt the story was very good, though a little complex, if you are trying to fully comprehend the story. This is worth a listen if you like alternative history or somewhat steampunk-esque historical fiction.
Charles Orr
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June 4, 2021
It's worth a read.
About the author
COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the 2016 National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. He lives in New York City.
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