Underground Railroad, the

Winner of 2016’s National Book Award for Fiction and Amazon.com's Number 1 Book of 2016   Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2017. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017

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