#1NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER “An American masterpiece” (NPR) thatchroniclesa young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon 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 womanhoodwhere 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 Railroadis both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondageand a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Look for Colson Whiteheads bestselling new novel,Harlem Shuffle!