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  • The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Colson Whitehead
  • Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
  • Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (195 ratings)

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The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)

Written by: Colson Whitehead
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
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Publisher's Summary

#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!

©2016 Colson Whitehead (P)2016 Random House Audio

What the critics say

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

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What listeners say about The Underground Railroad (Television Tie-in)

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Moving.

The narrator is exquisite. The story is touching, heartbreaking and informative. It is a shameful part of American history that is told in a way that moves and encourages understanding.
Highly recommend.

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Well read and interesting

Worth the time. Sad but hopeful at the same time. You are constantly interested in what happens next.

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The Underground Railroad

This book made me realize just how extensive the Underground Railroad was.. I had always thought it was a system of paths and trails through the brush and swamps. There were freed slaves and abolushionists who arranged and led slaves to freedom following those routes. What a lot of work the unknown builders did in order to create those railroads and to have to fill in ones that were discovered was another huge job.

The cruelty of the slave owners and the slave hunters was terrible. I thought most were caring and kind but this book portrays the opposite. I enjoyed listening to Cora’s flight to freedom and her relationships as she moved further away from her slave owner. Did she stay in St Louis or go on to California?

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pretty good

The author was a bit long winded for my taste... lots of unnecessary background information I thought. it's a hard read with all the cruelty but very eye opening at the same time. overall pretty good if you like stories from the slave days.

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Disturbing and very informative

Racism is a horrible thing. A must listen.
I was so ignorant to history until this book. So thankful I am a Canadian.

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Great book

Loved it. Had no problems finishing this book. Tough accounts of the life that African Americans lived. We should never forget what our ancestors endured.

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