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Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad

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Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish 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 and, 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. 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.

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.
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329 printed pages
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Impressions

  • Olga Zhuvakshared an impression3 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot

    Сложный язык,но сюжет захватывающий.

  • Ellen Shubichshared an impression5 years ago

    A story that takes you through the struggle for survival of a young black woman that tells of black lives in southern plantation days, and raises awareness of how brave some (blacks and whites) have been to end slavery. Yet, it resonates today because there is such
    a long way to go.

  • Lola Lobashared an impression7 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💀Spooky
    🔮Hidden Depths
    💡Learnt A Lot
    🎯Worthwhile
    🚀Unputdownable
    💧Soppy

    This book went straight to my heart and will stay there.

Quotes

  • gal3011has quoted3 years ago
    People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.
  • kravenhas quoted3 years ago
    THE first and last things she gave to her daughter were apologies. Cora slept in her stomach, the size of a fist, when Mabel apologized for what she was bringing her into. Cora slept next to her in the loft, ten years later, when Mabel apologized for making her a stray. Cora didn’t hear either one.
  • kravenhas quoted3 years ago
    The air in the room turned prickly, they told their families, quickened by an unseen power. Whether they had been born free or in chains, they inhabited that moment as one: the moment when you aim yourself at the north star and decide to run. Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.

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