The Underground Railroad

Cora is enslaved on a Georgia plantation in the nineteenth-century American South. Her attempt to escape takes her onto an Underground Railroad that Colson Whitehead imagines as a physical railway, complete with secret routes and safe houses. This departure from literal history defines the novel’s premise.

Published in 2016, The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction that year and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017. Its treatment of slavery combines a historical setting with an imagined means of travel toward freedom.