Underground Railroad, The

Underground Railroad, The
Colson Whitehead
RRP:
NZ$ 36.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 29.59
Paperback
h203 x 132mm - 336pg
4 May 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780593314760
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order

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9780349726809 UK Paperback $19.99

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all the slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, and they plot their escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her - but they manage to find a station and head north. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is not a metaphor - a secret network of tracks and tunnels has been built beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, where both find work in a city that at first seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens - and Ridgeway, the relentless slave-catcher sent to find her, arrives in town. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, state-by-state, seeking true freedom. Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey - Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in states in the pre-Civil War era.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.
Leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery ... with echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift ... Colson Whitehead has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present. -- Michiko Kakutani New York Times [The Underground Railroad] is really good - good, in fact, in just about every way a novel can be good ... a grave and fully realized masterpiece, a weird blend of history and fantasy that will have critics rightfully making comparisons to Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garc -M quez. Boston Globe A book that resonates with deep emotional timbre. The Underground Railroad reanimates the slave narrative, disrupts our settled sense of the past and stretches the ligaments of history right into our own era ... The story charges along with incredible power ... The canon of essential novels about America's peculiar institution just grew by one. -- Ron Charles Washington Post Reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in and stays forever ... a tour de force. -- Oprah Winfrey Masterful, urgent ... one of the finest novels written about our country's still unabsolved original sin. -- Charles Finch USA Today In powerful, precise prose, at once spellbinding and ferocious, the book follows Cora's incredible journey north, step by step ... the story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen. Publishers Weekly Startlingly original ... Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing authority and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank. Kirkus Magnetizing and wrenching ... Each stop Cora makes along the Underground Railroad reveals another shocking and malignant symptom of a country riven by catastrophic conflicts, a poisonous moral crisis, and diabolical violence. Each galvanizing scene blazes with terror and indictment as Whitehead tracks the consequences of the old American imperative to seize, enslave, and profit ... Hard-driving, lasersharp, artistically superlative, and deeply compassionate, Whitehead's unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation. Booklist The Underground Railroad is an instant classic that makes vivid the darkest, most horrific corners of America's history of brutality against black people Huffington Post
Colson Whitehead is the New York Times bestselling author of The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780593314760
Published: 4 May 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Anchor Books
Publisher: Anchor Books
Format: Paperback
Height: 203mm
Width: 132mm
Weight: 368g
Pages: 336

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