The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead [Paperback]

The Underground Railroad is a powerful historical novel following Cora, an enslaved woman on a brutal cotton plantation in antebellum Georgia, who escapes northward with fellow slave Caesar. Colson Whitehead transforms the historical Underground Railroad into a literal subterranean railway, using Cora’s perilous journey through different states to expose the varied forms of racism, violence, exploitation, and oppression faced by Black Americans before the Civil War. Blending historical reality with speculative fiction, the novel becomes both a gripping story of survival and freedom and a profound meditation on American history, slavery, race, and the enduring legacy of oppression.