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Summary:

From #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South 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; there 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.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their 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.-- [from publisher's description]

Table of Contents:

• Ajarry
• Georgia
• Ridgeway
• South Carolina
• Stevens
• North Carolina
• Ethel
• Tennessee
• Caesar
• Indiana
• Mabel
• The North.

Author/Creator:

Whitehead, Colson, 1969- , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

The underground railroad: a novel [by Whitehead, C.]

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Underground railroad [by Whitehead, C.] (New York : Doubleday, 2016 — ISBN 9780385537032; LCCN 2016000643; OCLC Number 933420484)

Subjects:

Underground Railroad — Fiction

Fugitive slaves — United States — Fiction

United States — History — 19th century — Fiction

1800-1899

Fugitive slaves

Underground Railroad

United States

Genres:

Fiction

Historical fiction

History

General Notes:

Description based on: Print version record.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 pages)

Digital Characteristics:

text file

Call Numbers:

PS3573.H4768 U53 2016eb

ISBNs:

9780385537049 (electronic bk.)
0385537042 (electronic bk.)
9780385542364 (hardcover) [Invalid]
0385542364 (hardcover) [Invalid]
9780385537032 (hardcover) [Invalid]
0385537034 (hardcover) [Invalid]
9781524736309 (L.P., pbk.) [Invalid]
1524736309 (L.P., pbk.) [Invalid]

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2016004953

OCLC Numbers:

936433492