The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

A Novel

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

#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 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years

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.

Critic reviews

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE, THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, THE ALA ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL AND THE HURSTON/WRIGHT AWARD ** NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, TIME, PEOPLE, NPR AND MORE ** #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Get it, then get another copy for someone you know because you are definitely going to want to talk about it once you read that heart-stopping last page.”
--Oprah Winfrey (Oprah's Book Club 2016 Selection)

“[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel... It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present.”
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Think Toni Morrison (Beloved), Alex Haley (Roots); think 12 Years a Slave…An electrifying novel…a great adventure tale, teeming with memorable characters…Tense, graphic, uplifting and informed, this is a story to share and remember.”
--People, (Book of the Week)

"With this novel, Colson Whitehead proves that he belongs on any short list of America's greatest authors--his talent and range are beyond impressive and impossible to ignore. The Underground Railroad is an American masterpiece, as much a searing document of a cruel history as a uniquely brilliant work of fiction."
--Michael Schaub, NPR

“Far and away the most anticipated literary novel of the year, The Underground Railroad marks a new triumph for Whitehead…[A] book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era...The canon of essential novels about America's peculiar institution just grew by one.”
--Ron Charles, Washington Post

Hard to follow in audio format

Any additional comments?

The story is fascinating and important, but there are aspects to the story that make it hard to follow in this format. It felt like there were opening quotes, or ads searching for missing slaves at the introduction of each chapter, which didn't translate well in audio. There is also quite a bit of reminiscing done by the characters which also became difficult to understand.I may go back and re-read this sometime because I feel like I kept missing parts. I would recommend the book, but I would recommend reading it as opposed to listening.

gives you something you didn't know you needed

love it, in a painful way. this book makes the thought of all the fox news boomers make me want to save my energy and not even acknowledge them.

A little overrated

It was decent. Not really extraordinary, but it was a decent story. Cora was a strong character.

3.75 stars

The book was very detailed with well written narratives and horrifying situations of what a person trying to survive slavery in the 1800s and make a way of escape towards freedom might have endured.

Cora is the main character in this story. She makes her way along the underground railroad and shares her various experiences of life in slavery causing her to want to get out, shares interactions with the conductors she stays with while on the road, shares times with those she befriends or is wary of, and even shares times with a slave hunter out to get her.

It was unique and has some content that is definitely not suitable for minors.

edit:
By the way, I was really confused at times during the reading of this book that there seemed to be an ACTUAL railroad, rather than the whole metaphor of one that existed in reality. It took me a while to catch on to the way she viewed her journey towards freedom.

Good story....but

I loved the narrator and I loved cora's journey. I just didn't like the way the story was told. It was very confusing to me and jumped all through time without a lot of glue to hold the sections together.
This era fascinates and horrifies me...I wanted to really get more out of this than I actually did.