WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WI NNER 2016 AMAZON.COM #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELL ER AND A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Whitehead is on a roll: the revie ws have been sublime' Guardian 'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Obse rver 'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year ' Stylist 'Dazzling' New York Review of Books Praised by Barack Obam a and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead wo n the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existe nce, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Af ricans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awa its. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Un derground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railr oad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Ca esar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven . But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing bla ck inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to f ind Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harro wing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the uniqu e terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly we aves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfi lled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the stor y of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatterin gly powerful meditation on history.